Our Fleet chooses courses based on the wind direction to try to get as much W-L in as possible, not always perfect because we use existing nav and other club's marks. I'm usually disappointed if we can't get a mostly W-L course. It's just more interesting to me as far as competing goes - there's far more that needs to be considered - what side of the course, who to cover, etc. in addition to keeping the boat speed up and playing the conditions/waves/wind, and getting the tacks and jibes (nothing better than good fast jibe...) right or at least better than the other guys. And yes, there's tactics on all points of sail, but I think there's more on W-L course. We do reaching legs sometimes to get to where we'll do W-L laps, sometimes we feel the need to air it out and just drag race (reach) for a course, and sometimes conditions change on the course and things end up as reaches. And reaches are fun, don't get me wrong, but for me it makes for less interesting racing, and doesn't do much for overall skill building. It is probably more interesting for spectators. We just got done with 26 Tuesdays worth of racing in which we attempted to make the courses mostly W-L (not perfect, and our start line is usally heavily biased...), I still prefer it, and our record attendance for our Fleet shows that emphasis is not turning people away.



Although I do like the potential for a good finish for myself when the course has more reaching - I think the performance differences between boat designs goes away to a large degree and boats like mine can make great use of their rating when a decent amount of jib-reaching occurs. I feel a little bad for some of the boats in this case, as I think the W-L advantages in some of the newer designs (reflected in their ratings) go away somewhat in those conditions.



It's interesting that some say W-L is a monohull thing. All boats perform better on a beam reach - the beam reach was taken out of the mono courses for same reason - it didn't add much to the racing even if it was fun. I like to tell monohullers that we try to do W-L as much as possible, because they don't believe that we can sail upwind - the reaction is almost always the same.



My $0.02, for whatever it's worth...