One of the most important things you can do is study the wind and the water. It's like a big laboratory out there.

Every time you are out sailing, even if just for fun or taking a day trip to an island, you can observe persistent wind shifts and geographical shifts, and you can learn to time oscillating shifts.

By observing wave action, you can sometimes determine not only the present wind direction but the future wind direction -- or whether there is current (wind, geographical, or tidal) and the direction of the current.

You can learn to watch puffs as they hit the water and based upon the direction of the little riffles on the surface, you can tell whether you are sailing into a lift or a header.

And you can observe the clouds overhead and note whether you are getting puffs of wind coming down from a cloud. If there is a storm system in the distance, is it causing the wind direction to change and come stronger from the direction of the storm, or is it sucking all the wind up and making the air die where you are.

All these observations go into your mental databank and end up being what we usually call "experience." This knowledge and experience helps you to automatically make better decisions on the race course about when to zig and when to zag and what side of the course to be on. And this is true for both buoys racing and distance racing.

I have absorbed a little of this knowledge and experience just by osmosis from having sailed for so many years. But I know the expert sailors work actively at acquiring and storing this kind of knowledge -- and they take notes about such things at every regatta they participate in and everywhere they sail or practice.

When you think those hotshots have an edge on you, that "edge" is often in a notebook where they have written down all the local knowledge and their own observations about that venue from the last time(s) they sailed there (or at a similar venue)