When to Heave-To - Storm Tactics
When you're going to windward, it's relatively easy. Ah, the waves will start hitting the windward bow and thumping you. It'll get uncomfortable and you're probably thinking of reducing canvas. Going to windward, you're in the close-hauled position, so all you need to do to become hove-to, is just simply: drop your headsail and tie your helm down about 20 degrees to leeward, and you start to develop your slick to windward. This slick, of disturbed water, is what's going to protect you and your ship. So how do you know when to heave-to when you're beam reaching? Well, usually we heave-to a little earlier because the seas will hit the beam of the boat really hard and give you a thump. And so we decide to drop the staysail and head up. So we end up, by the time we're headed up, in the classic hove-to position. We may sheet the main or the trysail in a bit as we come up into the wind. And then we tie the helm down and almost immediately we start to develop our slick, which again, protects us from breaking seas. When do you heave-to when you're running down wind? This is the most problematical decision you have to make. Because you're running down wind, your going where you want to go. You really don't want to stop, heave-to and not go anywhere. So you're running kind of dry and fast, and the motion is relatively good. But, when the waves start breaking under your transom and the boat starts to loose steerage or wander, gets squishy on the helm, this is the time you could broach. And if you broach and lay over, you could be in big trouble. So normally what we do is drop the staysail and continue on a bit with the trysail or the reefed main. And we wait for a patch between breaking seas. So we'll get a sea probably breaks beside us over here. There's been another one down over here. And we'll tootle down here and round up so that we end in this position. HauLin Pardeyg in the main as we round up into the wind. The main comes in flat. We tie the helm down to leeward about 20-degrees. And almost immediately, we start producing a slick here, of disturbed water. And this is what will protect your boat from breaking seas. Now when this decision to heave-to is being made, we've already made the decision we're not going to run under bare poles. We did this once in the Baltic and were broached badly. So, when we think about running under bare poles, we say, no, let's heave-to instead. So as we go down and make the turn and come up, we've got the trysail there. If you took the sail down and ran under bare poles, and then decided to heave-to, you'd have to put the trysail back up so you could round up and heave-to correctly.