How to Trim the Sails on a Boat

Video Transcript

"We are underway now, under sail and what we are looking for sail trim wise, is we want to get, you'll notice that we have some telltales, on the jib, we have some green ones on the starboard side of that jib, and we have some red ones on the port side. And ideally, on a windy day, which we don't have, you would want all the telltales flowing back parallel to each other and that would indicate that you have good wind flow on each side of the sail. The, and what that does is give you a good airfoil, and that gives you the lift that you want to develop as it moves about through the water, it allows you to go upwind. And then once you get, whoops, we don't have them on this boat, okay, telltales on the mainsail. But there are some sails, some sailboats that have telltales on the mainsail as well. Yeah, there are, yeah, okay let me start over. The, there are, once you get the telltales on the jib flying correctly, today, again it's, the wind is a little light and they're not going backwards like they should be, you would next check your main and a lot of, a lot of mainsails will have telltales coming off the leech of the sail, or the trailing edge. And those should be flowing backwards, straight back from the sail. If they're kept forward on one side or the other then you need to let the sail out or trim it in and get the sail telltales flying away from the back of the sail."