Are you working hard enough on downwind boat speed? It’s easy to lose focus, even though downwind sailing requires at least as much concentration as upwind sailing. For this post, we decided to compile a big picture list of things…

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…

In this week’s episode, Olympic Sailing Team members Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shea reveal their downwind tactics secrets. There’s plenty of good stuff here for all levels of racers. Need a better way to decide how to exit the windward…

As the 2019 summer racing season gets underway, your SailZing editors have been gathering race experiences to help drive home concepts about boat speed, handling, strategy, and tactics. In the past two weeks, we found four examples of downwind strategy…

Dave Dellenbaugh’s Speed and Smarts, Issue 130 (May/June 2014) has a very informative diagram showing how to use apparent wind clues to sail faster and smarter downwind. We present Dave’s diagram as a quiz, with his answers reprinted in the…

I think our biggest gains were made downwind. … The boats really like to be sailed with some twist at the top of the sail, sailing by the lee, and heeled to weather … This, combined with zig-zagging downwind to…