Terry Stafford: Once you got the sails up, motor shut off and you’re now sailing. The processes of maneuvering a sail boat from that point on really depend a large degree on the strength of the wind. The wind is not blowing hard, and I would recommend that you always practice in the early stages when the wind is not blowing too hard. It really comes down to the question of learning how to tack both up wind and down wind and when you tack up wind, its a process known as going above where the boat goes through the eye of wind, the eye of the wind is simply the direction from which the wind is blowing from and go on to a different tack like if you’re on a port tack, then you go above; now you’re on starboard tack and vice versa.
The other way to cross the eye of the wind is to do a maneuver a called jibe that’s where you’re running with the wind and you cross the wind and the boom ship sight, bad moved maneuver is somewhat more difficult to learn, but those are the really the two basic maneuvers, then it’s a matter of learning of what point of sail that you want to sail, whether it would close of hauled, which is just close to the wind as you can be because obviously, you can’t sail it directly into the wind or you want to be or running with the wind when the is directly behind you, it’s a question of getting used to that. I going to teach you about jibing in a series of figurate maneuvers whereby you go through the wind, sail on a port tack, come above sail on starboard tack and repeat that process, if you look at it on a map, its essentially going to be a figurate or you can do the same thing doing a serious of jibes, you jibe from a port tack to starboard tack, sail across the wind, and repeat the process.
In both cases, is you’re doing figurate. The figurate is an essential maneuver because its also a good way to maneuver board situations or over board or whatever it is that you lose over board. Okay, we’re going to get ready to tack, ready about hardly. We’re going to have to do this very control because the wind is blowing very hard. Nicely done; getting off winds coming around to my back, I’m going to uncleat these jibes and hold with my hand, so that I can feel it what he is doing. Okay, it’s getting ready to cross over, ready to jibe, jibe up, okay. A couple of things about that, and that is you’ve got to be very sure that after that boom comes over, that you maintain control of the wheel or the tiller, but as if you don’t do it, the boat will instantly try to hit up into the wind, it’ll heel dangerously because you don’t have really much speed, and you just have to tip the boat over, so that’s it. After you get through the jibe, hold your course and do you have your jibe and your main both under control, before you resume, of course, in another direction.
Trimming the sails is kind of the art of sailing it. When you get to the boat, when you can do the basic the maneuver, then you can worry about sail trimmed somebody great. Trimming must see -- first of all the best thing is to do is decide where you want to steer, and then once you’ve decided, you know where you want to steer towards then go ahead and you trim the sails accordingly. If you’re steering yourself you’re off the wind a little bit why then you need to let the sails out. The rule of thumb is that you go ahead and you trim the jibe first and then after you have the have jibe trimmed then you trim the main. What you do as you pull the jibe in and then you go ahead and you let it out until its starts to loft, and at the point at which it starts to loft then you pull it back in little bit and that should be your idea of trim.
On your main sail, it depends on what kind of boat you have some main sails -- some boats the mains will actually prefer to be luffing a little bit when the jibe is trimmed, in order to get maximum speed out of that. Again, the rule of thumb is that you trim the sail right on the point at which it wants to luff and then you pull it in just a little bit.
Okay, well the wind now, we’ve had a few guys over 30 knots, and as you can see through, we’re whipping along pretty good. This situation although, it may appeared to be uncomfortable, its not uncomfortable the boat is stable; however one of the most important things to do, in a case like this as you can easily lose control of the boat this shows the boat heels over and the wind blows harder, the boat has more and more of a tenancy to want to go into the wind, and in the process of having that happened, you can lose control of it. So what you have to do in order to keep that from happening, you have to be at the ready all the time when the wind is high at the main sheet to let it out, as I’ve just gone and you can hear the main sail luffing, but this is the only way that I can maintain control of the rudder in this particular situation because rudder is pretty small, you don’t want to get into a situation where you round into the wind out of control because in a smaller boat you can tip boat over.
Okay, what we’re going to do wing-on-wing is really another way that you can sail down wind, so that you don’t have to sail with this tall jibe. The jibe is been blanketed by the main sail when you’re going dead down wind. If we go just a little bit further off the wind, so that it’s actually coming from the opposite tack. In other words, over your same shoulder as the main sail was on then you can get the jibe to cross and you control jibe on the opposite side. There has you to doing it is that you are constantly in danger of doing an accidental jibe, so you have to be very, very careful and pay some attention to what you’re doing and I recommend taking the jibe sheets off the winds, when you do this so that you can rapidly change what you’re doing.
Now, I’m just about down wind and the jibe is crossed over. Now I’m going to try to trim it on the opposite side, you have to keep tension in both sheets though because you have to wrap the -- here we go. Alright, that’s not going to last long, but that’s wing-on-wing, if the main sail is trimmed to starboard and the jibe is trimmed to port and I’m not going to be able to hold this for very long, but that’s basically how it’s done and just watch out for your boom that you don’t do an accidental jibe, and I think with that I’ll go back to conventional trim, before I wrap the jibe up around the
four stack. Now we’re out of it, now we’re back on conventionally.
One of the things that I do is that I carry a set of jumper cables in the boat and that used for connecting batteries, but rather if you get into a situation where you potentially have lightening out on the light, you attach a jumper cable to one of the shrubs, it holds ups the mast and drop it alive, that gives another path through the lightening to follow rather than through the bottom of your boat, if it turns out the top of your mast to struck by lightening, I mean that’s just you know, fortunately it’s never happened, so I’ve never -- it’s never been tested with -- I do that on less. The best way to do determine, if you’re going to have thunder storm or not, really is to just watch the clouds, if they building very quickly then this probably not a bad idea to head for port.
The ones today these are fair whether a cumulous clouds, they’re not building, their tops are flat, they’re relatively short and they’re not going to develop to any degree, the worse that we get passed away have out of them would be a shower around sun set is they collapse. One of the most difficult safety things to deal with on a sail boat and especially for new people who are just getting into this port or even folks who are coming along for the first time or you know and haven’t been schooled. The boats have lots of lines and the lines do various things, you have dark lines, you have sheets to control sails, you have halyards, you’re up have to lines on the deck, that’s especially true with smaller boats, where you don’t have a lot of fairly blocks and sheaves and things like that will take the lines, you know away from where you’re going to walk. When you’re sailing at any given time, all are these line are apt to be in motion.
Most of the people that I’ve seen go over board, have gone over board because they got their feet tangled up in lines that were in motion, when you’re tacking and jibing or making some sort of a maneuver. Admittedly, most of that is happened during racing situations, but you can happen to the weekend sailor as well, and you have to very careful that you breathe your passenger before you ever go out whether they’re experienced or not to watch out for moving lines. You can also help the situation tremendously by keeping lines that are not being used coiled up and making sure that the ones that are running, are free that you don’t sit on them, step on them you know do other things.
One other thing I should mention and that is, we should always not -- any line that goes through a block or a sheave, so that the line will not be pulled through the sheave that can cause a real fire drilling in emergency.
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