Comments Thread for Giu's Sailing Videos

[RevBuck]

Wow thank you, I enjoyed the videos very much. Please, keep 'em coming! Rev (captain of American Mariner 21, Anastasia)

[Slooptattoo]

So, as my admiral and I are doing deck maintenence on "Tattoo" today, I call out "bordo" and she looks to me as if I'm an idiot. So I tell her I'm becoming multi-lingual and she chases me with a winch handle and I screamed "you got the right tool at least"!
Tell Fred he looked to be in prime form during the sail. When I was ten the only crew I could muster were Winnie and Tigger, but my dad didn't own a full born racing machine either. Stay proud Giu, you've earned it, keep it up.

[xort]

even better alex!

[TrueBlue]

Nicely done Alex - clear and concise instructional, both educational and enjoyable. Your video production skills are noticably improving with each production

[sailhog]

I recently bought and read Peter Nielsen's book on sail trim. It's a fine book, but he struggles to convey the central concepts of whatever it is he's trying to explain, and it can get downright exasperating. I think this has a lot to do with the limits of the text-and-still-photo combination when trying to explain something as dynamic as sail trim. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth 100,000 words -- especially when you add the graphics and simple text. Excellent work, Captain Alex! My only request is for a video on the various points of sail...

[sailhog]

On a related note... Somebody made a comment on the points of sail -- I think it might have been Cockeyedbob. He said something to the effect that, of all the points of sail, the fastest is... away... I thought that was pretty good.

[max-on]

Alex, I already posted this request in "Sailing Video 3" but probably should have posted it here; in the upcoming cunningham video, can you address the proper way to setup a cunningham as many people may not have one on their boat.

[Slooptattoo]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17958133@N08/1856601587/

Not exactly loosing my rudder, but this is what I had to steer with for 1460 miles until I got to the azores. Thought you would appreciate this one Giu.

[Valiente]

Alex, the "outhaul" one is concise and well-presented. I must say that your command of sail control words in English is exceptional...probably because those are the most interesting words to you, like "Molson's" and "exchange rate". Also, the drawings and the little animated arrows were well done and easy to follow. It's nice to see this stuff (even though I already know it), because it shows the entire process in a logical order.

Anyway, well done. I think in some ways the fact that you are explaining things in English is a positive, because you have to work harder than a native speaker to be as unambiguous as possible, which is sometimes difficult for a native English speaker to accomplish.

[Sasha_V]

Alex. I am really enjoying your video tutorials...One suggestion. In the Backstay video, it might be of help to point out that most masthead rigs that are geared for performance in some way use a baby-stay so as to allow mast bending through backstay tension. The babaystay gets tenioned to provide the initial bend and then the backstay is tightened up which gives you the same sort of mast bend as in a fractional rig.

I could be worng, but one of the key differences with masthead and frac rigs that I always thought was ind of universal is that frac rigs tend to have the mast somewhat further forwards in the hull and masthead rigs tend to have the mast sitting further back towards the widest part of the boat.

It would also be nice to have some mention in the video of the times when you would use the backstay to flatten the top part of the sail but leave the bottom part bellied by not hauling the backstay, etc...

Other then that...Great work.


Sasha