When am I supposed to train this? I am hardly ever on the water.

Sailing is a costly sport in time. Drive out, rig up, two hours afloat, de-rig, drive home – two hours of training swallows five. Add whole months when frost and ice stop everything. And for children, every session depends on a parent with a car.

Do the arithmetic once. A young sailor training once a week from April to October, plus ten regatta weekends, reaches a good two hundred hours a year. A committed cruising sailor with four charter trips lands at around one hundred. That is a few per cent of the year – for everything the sport costs in money, kit and lifetime.

Mental training creates training time where there is none. It needs no water, no boat, no weather and no trailer. It runs through the winter, between passages, through illness, and on every evening you cannot get out.

It does not replace an hour afloat. It makes the few you have worth more.