Our recent post, Learn to Change Gears, focused on three upwind “gears:” footing, pointing, and max VMG. These gears rely on changing the angle of attack. In this post we address another form of gears: using sail controls, rig tuning…

Basic jib trim on a dinghy is not difficult, but beginning racers need to know a few things. In this post, we discuss the importance of the jib and a simple approach to setting the jib leads and sheeting. Why…

You probably don’t want to imitate the picture above, but you can raise your sailing game if you learn to hike harder and smarter. Hiking takes effort, but by being fit and using proper technique you can get better results…

As a follow-up to our series on Upwind Mainsail Trim, we wanted to sharpen our skills at analyzing upwind sail shape. With the help of a former sailmaker, we photographed sails and studied their “flying shape.” This post discusses what…

We’ve written several posts about various aspects of upwind boat speed, but many readers like content summarized. In this post we present an upwind boat speed checklist, collected from previous SailZing.com content. These skills require practice to execute them more…

Can’t point without pinching and losing speed? For this article, we collected everything we could find on how to solve common pointing problems. The experts are quite consistent, and what they say matches our experience. Here are five tips, in…