I have a friend, Phil, who likes to joke around about all the ropes, lines, pulleys, strings, spaghetti, wires, ropes, lines, blah, blah, blah on a boat. He even does a little dance while he’s calling out all the names he can think of for the many parts on the boats we sail.
While funny, its also a bit telling. All of the controls on a sailboat can be a bit overwhelming to new sailors and old salts alike. But it is those controls that can make sailing fast, fun, and safe.
I do a lecture on sail trim and balance. It is my favorite to give, and in spite of its fairly fundamental nature is the best received because it provides a frame work for decision making and experimentation.
Sailing is about using the sails and the keel or centerboard to balance energies for desired outcomes. For racers that means using the sails to make the boat sail as fast as possible and to steer. Crusiers want to get where they are going safely, quickly, and without spilling their wine.
The secret to either outcome is to have a deeper and better understanding of how sails generate power, and what controls impact those sources of power.
A sail generates and manages energy through three aspects or sources. Once understood the answer to question of “What does that control do, and when do I want to do it?” becomes a little easier find.
The first and easiest to understand is Angle of Attack. Technically speaking angle of attack is the angle of a sail’s chord to the apparent wind. I like to think of it as the in and out of a sail. The rough but nearly proper angle of attack is pretty easy to find. We use the mnemonic “when in doubt, let it out.” because it works. When a sail is eased too far it luffs. So if we let it out until it luffs we are at nearly the right angle of attack. Yet, sails don’t have as clear of an indicator of over trimming. So I add to the mnemonic, “if you are often in doubt you are rarely in error.” Continue reading ‘Sail Controls - BANG THE VANG!’
“We got used to eating fish and peanut butter,” said Eriksen, who celebrated his 41st birthday at sea. The pair left Long Beach, Calif., on June 1. Their 30-foot vessel had a deck of salvaged sailboat masts, six pontoons filled with 15,000 plastic bottles and a cabin made from the fuselage of a Cessna airplane.
You don’t find good friends that often, and I am blessed with the best. Better yet I don’t have the budget to find models this good looking, but Michael Harrison (aka Nunya, Nooner, Ninja, Tha Nunner) can fill up a GFS shirt with gold medal hunkiness. Go Nunson Go! His wife Audra would do well in a Gale Force Sailing baby-Tee, but this is a FAMILY site. Tee Hee.
It is GO time! Today is the first day of the 2008 J22 World Championship. The event is being held on Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York. Our team, Just Wing It, is made up of owner and trimmer and strategist extraordinaire Tim Adelman, bowman and weather guru Grady Buys, and me.
Tick tock. Tick tock. It’s just about race time. Stay tuned for more video blogs, podcasts from every race, and more.
For one day at least, the U.S. Sailing Team ruled the 2008 Olympic Regatta.
I just finished another great week of sailing coaching in Chester, Nova Scotia.
Check it out! You can now buy cool Gale Force Sailing gear online. Check out the 
OK, so I can’t spell. My dad’s been telling me for years and spell check…well I just ignore it. Meriwether Lewis (or was it Clark?) said that if a man can’t spell a word more than one way he lacks creativity… well I am fairly creative.
Some of you find me to be completely crazy. And there’s good reason for it. Earlier this week, I, in 72 hours, went from Annapolis to Chicago to New York to Nova Scotia. I also traveled via car, bus, plane, train, subway, monorail, taxi, bike and foot.
