Boat Handling & Performance

Here’s a drill to sharpen your puff response techniques. Most sailors know about “ease/hike/trim,” but many do not execute it well in different wind conditions. The No-Hike Hands Drill will help train your hands to respond correctly in a variety…

Are you a newer racing sailor? If so, sailing fast upwind may be one of the toughest things to learn. This post captures a virtual clinic with several newer sailors at the Lake Beulah Yacht Club. We focused the clinic…

Boats with only a mainsail (no jib), sometimes called cat-rigged boats, sail upwind with their boom further out than boats with jibs. Most of these main-only boats use “boom over the corner” as an initial trim reference. (The corner refers…

Pro sailors joining a new class expect to learn the boat quickly. They use their fundamental knowledge to dive into all the details of making the boat go fast. This post shows some examples of how you can accelerate your…

As a beginning sailor, your editor had to learn to sheet the mainsail hard enough to control the leech and point. So it was hard for me to understand the phrase “When in doubt, let it out.” Vaughan Harrison shows…

We’ve had several newer sailors ask us about sailing by the lee. This is not a well-understood topic, especially for those that haven’t raced seriously in cat-rigged (single sail) boats. For this post, we collected the available wisdom on sailing…