Raising the Main Sail: Free Online Sailing Lessons

Video Transcript

"We’re ready to pull our mainsail up, we’ve got the boat heading into the wind right now and what I’m going to do is release our strap or sail tie on the mainsail and pull that high up like we saw that before. So our halyard is attached to the head of the sail and its all clear. Once I get the sail most of the way up, I’m going to use my wench and I’m just going to let this swing right across here. I put my three wraps around the drum and start to crank my sail up. when I’m using a wench I want to keep an eye on what I’m doing, if the pressure on the line gets suddenly strong, it might be found on something and the wind is generating so much pressure that I could break something. Once I have my sail up I’m going to go ahead and pull the main sheet in to keep this sail from flopping all around. It’s always a good idea with your main halyard to make sure its ready to run at all times, so I’m going to pleat it off with a rope clutch, free up my wench because I’m going to want to use that for my jib and then I’m going to coil the line and I’m going to put it in a series of neat loops, that way if we did get a sudden storm were to come up we can take our sails down quickly and efficiently instead of having to untangle a line first. So we coil our line neatly and we’ll stow it on this boat down below. "