Trimming Your Sails on the Ocean

While tell tales will let you know how to trim your sail for peak performance, ignoring them for the sake of comfort may also be wise. Having poorly trimmed sails will cost you some speed, but the peace and tranquility it brings could be worth it to you.

When sailing downwind in light winds, the main steals a lot of air from the headsails. If you have the sheets on the headsails eased, these sails will lift with wind and then slat as you come down a swell. When the sail falls, so does the tension on the sheet. The sheet block will then fall onto the deck and make quite a bit of noise.

Being how the wave period in the Atlantic is around 8 seconds, this means that every 8 seconds you will hear a "TWANG!" on the deck. Do this for an entire day and you might go crazy!

In situations like this, you are faced with two options:

1. Either drop the headsail so it stops slating.
2. Over tighten the sheet to avoid it from going limp.

When you drop the sail, you lose all of that sail area entirely and unbalance your sail plan. This is far from ideal, especially on a broad reach, where you need the headsails to provide lee helm.

Over tightening the sheets will keep the noise from happening, but it will make your sails less efficient. This might cost you a fraction of a knot in light airs.

If you are deaf, or willing to put up with the noise for the small amount of speed gained, then by all means, trim based on the tell tales. If you prefer peace and comfort, then it would behoove you to over tighten the sheets and keep the peace inside the cabin.

Ideal Sailing Conditions

When people dream about sailing, they often picture a steady breeze and full sails set as they power through the seas. In a dream world, this may be fine, but in our world, ideal sailing conditions refer to winds that allow us to get to where we want to go as quickly and comfortably as possible. 

We have found that when we are full sail, the winds are actually a bit on the light side and we aren't going as fast as we could be if we had more wind. 

To us, ideal sailing conditions often involve a reefed sail plan. If we are reefed, we always have more sail available to us than what we are using. This means that if we feel the desire to go faster, all we need to do is set more sail! If you are full sail, then you have no recourse left, you are already at your maximum and have nowhere to go from there! 

In this situation, we were close reaching under our staysail and our mainsail with one reef in it. We were still able to achieve 5.5 knots with ease without heeling over much at all. This keeps the boat level and life aboard more comfortable as we don't have to worry about stuff sliding off of horizontal surfaces in the cabin.  

The only way this could have been more ideal is if we had been on a broad reach, there the seas come from behind and help push you along, instead of beating into them as you work to windward. 

All in all, when there is plenty of wind, you can reef down for comfort and still maintain your boat speed through the water. This will keep you moving fast, morale high, and dream sailing a reality! 

To Cover or Not To Cover Your Sails

When you anchor for a storm, you might be focused on such things as bottom conditions and the amount of scope to let out. While anchoring techniques are very important for safely riding out a storm, another part of storm preparedness is how you ready the rest of your yacht.

The anchor will be forced to hold your yacht against the water pressure from waves and tides, as well as the wind pressure from the air on your yacht.

Bulky items on deck, as well as dodgers and rigging will all add wind resistance to the equation and put more strain on the anchor as it struggles to hold you to the bottom. Reducing the strain on the anchor is wise, as it gives all your gear an easier time during the blow. Roller furling headsails are bulky and offer a great deal of windage, especially up high! Hank on headsails offer the distinct advantage that when the sail is lowered to the deck, the stay is bare and offers minimal resistance to the wind. But what about the sail that is now on the deck?

Should you bag your sails or simply lash them to the deck before a storm approaches?

Bagged sails offer the advantage that they are inside a smooth covering. This will reduce turbulence as the air passes over the sail and will in turn create less drag. If the sail is simply lashed to the deck, the luff of the sail will be flacked at the stay and will offer a lot of resistance to the wind.

Looking at the situation from this standpoint only, it would make sense that bagging the sails would be ideal before a storm, as it would make everything on your yacht more streamline and thus less drag.

The problem with bagging your sails is that if you begin to drag anchor and need to sail away to safety, your sails are all bagged up! You now need to take additional time to uncover the sails and get everything setup so that you can sail away to safety! In moments where you are dragging anchor onto a lee shore, every second counts and having the sails bagged up might result in you being careened on the lee shore!

If you simply lashed your sails down, all you would need to do in this scenario would be to untie the and begin working your way to safety!

Based on these assumptions, and the fact that we don't have a diesel motor to power us to safety, we choose to lash the sails down to the deck when anchoring for a storm. The sails are kept with halyards and sheets attached, but lashed to the toenail with sail ties. Should we need to start sailing for any reason, all we need to do is untie the sails and raise them up to begin clawing our way off the lee shore.

Storms are never comfortable events to endure, but careful preparation can make your memories of the storms much less eventful.

Arthwartship Sheet Positioning

Most yachts are equipped to adjust the sheets in a fore aft direction via jib tracks. Some yachts have inhauls and barber hauls on their sheet blocks to allow for arthwartship positioning. Arthwartship is merely something that is in the beam dimension of the yacht. Inhauls and barber hauls simply move the block towards centerline or towards the sheer.

These adjustments may seem unnecessary, but in fact they are very important for headsail control on various points of sail. If your yacht is not setup to adjust these controls, it may be a good idea to figure out another way to still accomplish the end goal. 

When pointing to windward, the angle of attach of your sail is dictated by the location of your clew. If your clew is set far out on the cap rail, you will never be able to sheet the sail close hauled and sail close to the wind. Instead, you will be forced to sail at much wider angles and this will reduce your Velocity Made Good as you work to windward. 

By bringing your sheet block inboard, you also bring your yacht closer to the wind as your headsail can maintain the same angle of attach with your yacht pointing higher.  

When reaching, the opposite is true. If your sheet positions are far inboard, your sail will have to be eased considerably to reach. This will cause the leech to open up and twist horribly. You will have a sail presented to the wind, but all the wind will spill out the twist and provide very little drive. By moving the sheet block outboard, you can alleviate this problem by setting your block far forward (to control the leech) and outboard. Now you're able to pull in on the sheet, close the leech, and reach with power. 

On racing yachts, the sheet block is usually a ring suspended by four lines. One runs forward, one aft, one inboard, and one outboard. The fore and aft lines control the fore and aft position of the block, just like a car on a track. The inboard line is the inhaul which pulls the block inboard to allow better pointing to windward, while the outboard line is the barber haul, which pulls the block outboard for reaching. 

It is not always practical to convert your yacht with a perfectly functional jib track to this system, which is why snatch blocks may be your new best friend. If you have a perforated aluminum toe rail, you can easily clip the snatch block to the rail and lead the sheet from the sheet block into the snatch block. You have now effectively moved the sheeting position outboard and successfully created a barber haul for reaching and running. 

Adding a padeye inboard would allow you to place a snatch block further inboard, thus creating a close hauled sheeting point for beating. 

Life gets easier if you have a cutter, as your staysail will typically have a track that is further inboard than your jib. When beating close hauled, you will have to lower the staysail to reduce interference with the jib as you point higher. Since the staysail is not flying, you can also hook a snatch block onto the staysails jib track and give you a fully adjustable further inboard track to sheet your jib to. This will allow you to point your cutter like if it were a sloop, yet retain all the ocean going advantages of a cutter whine offshore. 

Sheet Leads

An often overlooked component of a headsail is the sheet lead position. While some people treat these blocks as static and permanently set attachment points, the truth is, they are meant to be moved around depending on what you are trying to achieve with your headsail.

Sheet leads are typically only able to move fore-aft, but some yachts are equipped to allow arthwartship adjustment as well. Fore-aft is by far the most common form of adjustment, where the sheet block is setup on a car mounted to a track. 

In the simplest of ways, moving the car forward is ideal in light air situation while moving the car aft is ideal in heavy air situations. The reason is, as you move the car forward, the force of the sheet is transferred up into the leech of the sail, allowing the foot to fill in. This creates a bigger chord in the sail and generates more power. When you move the sheet block aft, the force of the sheet gets transferred over to the foot of the sail. This will cause the foot to flatten and make the sail flatter. A flatter sail will generate less power and thus allow you to maintain control as the winds build. 

As you transfer the force of the sheet from foot to leech or leech to foot, the other side of the sail becomes ignored by the force. So when the car is forward, the leech is under control while the foot is ignored. When the car is aft, the foot is under control and the leech is ignored. This can serve some additional benefits as well. 

When winds build, you want to flatten the sail by tensioning the foot. Moving the car aft will accomplish this and it will also alleviate force on the leech. This will cause the sail to twist and the opening leech will spill excess air from the top of the sail. In high winds, this is ideal and will allow you to continue sailing along comfortably and safely. 

When you are reaching and have eased the sail, you may find that your sail is developing a twist, even though you don't want it to do so. Moving the car forward will allow you greater control of the leech and grant you the ability to close the twist in the sail, maximizing the power from the headsail. 

As of now, we understand that moving the car forward will control the leech and moving aft will control the foot, but where is the car to go to control both? The answer is somewhere in the middle. 

As you move the car forward and aft, the angle the sheet makes to the sail will change. With the car aft, the sheet will come into the sail at a very shallow angle. If you continue this line, it will meet the luff of the sail somewhere down near the tack. As you move the car forward, the sheet will meet the sail at a more extreme angle and the imaginary line will reach the luff further up towards the head of the sail. 

The neutral position where the force on the leech and foot are about equal is when the imaginary line that extends forward of the sheet meets the luff at about 40% the height of the luff (from tack to head). This point is considered to be the neutral position for your sheet block, and anything forward of this position is for lighter airs while anything aft is for heavy airs.