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…
Boat Handling & Performance
This category focuses on developing good boat handling & performance skills. These skills will help you develop stellar boat speed, solid tacks and gybes, and smooth mark roundings.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Thus far in our SailZing posts about puff response, we have consistently advocated “feather and ease, hike, and trim” as the best technique for puff response. So, we were intrigued to read “The Fallacy of Ease, Hike, Trim” (Sailing World),…
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Are you afraid of heavy air gybes (or jibe) due to either lack of experience or too many painful experiences? We asked Zack Clayton – a top scow sailor and sailcloth industry leader with Dimension-Polyant – to share his thoughts…