Hoisting the Main Sail: Free Online Sailing Lessons

Video Transcript

"Okay we’re ready to pull this mainsail up, we’ve got the boat facing into the wind, I’ve got the halyard attached to the head of the sail, so all I need to do is pull my halyard up and we’ll see that sail go up. we’re going to see at some point the weight of the sail and the tension in the sail gets too much for me to just pull this sail up and this is where our wench comes in handy. I will go ahead and have my three wraps around the drum here, through the guide on the top and into the groove and cleated off. Put a wind chandle in and now I can crank my hiatt up until I have the right tension on the forward edge of the sail which we call the luff of the sail. On a light wind day like today, we don’t need nearly as much tension as we do on a windy day. So I’ll pull it up just enough to get the wrinkles out of the sail. And when we go out sailing we’re going to see that the sail will have a shape to it, a curve that is what gives up power. When the wind is light, we want to have a more curve to our sail to generate more power, as the wind builds in the afternoon we’ll probably want to take some of that shape out and we’ll talk about that a little later on. "