Parts of a Sailboat : Sailing Lessons Online

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Kevin Winsley and I’m an instructor here at Offshore Sailing School and today for Expert Village I’m going to be talking about the language of sailing and identifying some parts of sailboat. So first of all I’m going to step on to the boat here. I’m going to step on to the point we had been at the front, which we call the bow. So I’m just going to step on to the bow, great and make my way back to the mast, it’s a good solid place to stand, so some parts of the boat, the bow at the front of the boat and then at the other end, at the blunt end as I like to call it, we have the stern and the distance between the two is called the length overall and this boat being a Colgate 26 you can see the 26 number that tells it is 26 feet long and a couple of other terms that we use an awful lot when we are referencing sailing is how we describe left and right we have to use the words port and starboard. So if you’re standing on the boat facing the bow then your left side is the port side of the boat and if you’re facing the bow the right side is the starboard side of the boat. I’m just going to move back into the cockpit a little bit here, cockpit being where we sit when we’re sailing. I got some good crew with me, say hi crew. Thank you. Other part of the boat that is going to be important to us when we’re sailing along, I have just mentioned the mast. Another thing that attaches to the mast that this big sailor is sitting on is called the boom and if you would like to hazard a guess as to why it’s called the boom well that’s the noise that it makes when you hits you. So what you need to do is keep your head down and away from the boom. So we have the boom, we have the mast and then we have some wires and supports that keep the mast upright. To stop the mast falling from side to side we have these things and these are called shrouds and we have the lower shrouds and upper shrouds and if we look up the rig of the mast here we can see that the upper shrouds are spread by this foils sticking out the sides of the mast and they are called spreaders. So this rigging here, the shrouds stop the mast from falling side to side. What stops the mast falling forwards and backwards is called stays. And on the Colgate 26 we have a system where the sail at the front of the boat, the jib is wrapped around a jib’s stay and that has a wire that stops the mast from falling backwards and then if we look towards the stern of the boat, the back of the boat then we have got a backstay, that’s wire that runs up here the backstay and that stops the mast from falling forward. So all that’s a part of what we call the standing rigging. "