How to Sail a Boat Downwind

Video Transcript

"If you work your way down wind to see how low you can point going down wind, just keep rounding off until your jib starts to collapse. See how it's starting to fold upon itself. It's starting to collapse and when it does that, then head back towards to the wind. Is there a tactical name for that? "Heading up' right now. Heading up, ok. Just come up enough until your jib fills back up again. Straighten your course out again and then that's about as close haul, close reach as you can. I mean, excuse me, broad reach. We'll do a second take. That was good stuff, by the way. I feel like there's really a good chunk of knowledge there. It's the same way going up wind. Crew prepare to head up. Ready, ready. Now we're going to head up toward the wind. As we do we're going to start trimming in our sails. We're going to bring them in closer to center. As we start coming up, we're going to be coming up on a close reach. Steve, what are you doing right now? I'm pulling in, if you look at the main sail, see, in the front, see how it's fluttering and it's not full. It's total luffing, and as I pull in the main you will notice you get that nice curved shape sail on the sail again. Now the front of the sail is no longer fluttering, or luffing. That's where you want, eventually you want to get all that fluttering out of there. That gives you your proper sail track. Again, just as we did going down wind, now we are headed up wind. We're going to test our sail. See how high we can point into the wind. What you do that, just keep heading towards the wind. The wind is coming from this direction. We'll keep an eye on our jib sail. The luff of the sail will start to collapse on us again and when it does collapse, we'll just fall back off. See, It's starting to fold up on us now. That's as high as we can point. If we point any further into the wind, the wind will not have any effect on our sails like right now. See how they're luffing. What we're going to do now is fall back off. We're going to bear away from the wind until our sails fill up and then we'll set our course. Ok. There we go, our sails are full again. What you are looking for is you want the tell-tails on the inside and the outside to be flying horizontal. That means you're getting the split of the wind correctly over both sides. Right now we're pretty close in a light wind. We have the back two tell-tales flying horizontal and also the green ones on the outside. Well show you which. Easy rule of thumb is which ever tell-tale is fluttering, you need to move the sail in that direction. For example, I'm going to let the jib sail out. I'm letting it out to a point. Did you notice, now the tell-tales are fluttering back and forth. That means we need to trim in or tighten the sail. We will use the winch and we'll bring the jib in until we can get those tell-tales flying horizontal again. In this light wind, that may be what we can get. A little bit more, we'll it out and see if we can get them flying a little bit better. They're getting a little bit more horizontal.. That looks pretty good. A rule of thumb, just to make sure the tell-tales are horizontal instead of fluttering. Yes and then you always trim the sail in the direction of which tell-tale is fluttering. So if you see the red ones in this case, if the red ones are fluttering you'd tighten the sail, trim it in. If the green ones on the outside are fluttering you would let the sail out. Use those as trim. There's multiple sets depending on the boat that you're on. This boat has multiple sets of tell-tales. You would kind of take the average of the lower and the upper and the tops set of tell-tales. For your trim. We have two sets. Actually there's one up, way up on the top. Oh, got it. It's usually the biggest trim problem is that people have the sails too tight. There's an old saying says "when in doubt let it out". It's always ease the sails and that's usually gets you more momentum. What do you mean to have the trim too tight? People just have a tendency just cranking these sails in real, real tight and that doesn't give you the optimum shape of the sail that you need to create that high and low pressure. What we tell everyone to do is error on the side on the side of being a little bit, a little less conservative with that sail and let it out and get some more shape to that sail."