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Heavy weather sailing

20K views 26 replies 15 participants last post by  outbound 
#1 ·
I''m a new sailor. I took sailing lessons, have read a couple of books and this fact of life was never mentioned... maybe the action was too basic! It makes perfect sense when you see the sails in action. I saw this tip in one of the sailing forums. It was news to me and I thought I''d share it with you. It works!!!
The boom is normally level- which is good for normal winds. However if the winds raise to 20 mph and the heel is starting to worry your wife, besides leting the sail out, you can tilt the boom up by loosing the boom vane and tightening the topping lift to help the sail spill the wind, giving you more control of your boat. It''s so easy.
Like-wise on very calm days you can lower the boom to help the sail leech catch more wind.
Try it, you will like it.
Happy sailing!
 
#2 ·
With all due respect, that is actually a pretty poor suggestion. When you ease the vang and pull up on the topping lift you put a lot of twist into the sail, and power it up. That is exactly what you don''t want in high winds because that means that part of the sail will be overtrimmed and part of the sail is undertrimmed. The overtrimmed and powered up portion of the sail induces a lot of heel without producing much drive and the under trimmed portion of the sail is free to flog which really takes a toll on the life span of the sail. A much better stategy that actually does work in real heavy conditions is to tension the halyard, outhaul, mainsheet and vang to really flatten the sail. Then lower the traveller close to its stops to adjust the sail to a small angle of attack. This will reduce heeling and weather helm.

Regards
Jeff
 
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#3 ·
I just spotted the end of your post, in lighter air you don''t want to tighten the leach. In lighter winds, gradiant wind effects typically require a lot of twist in your sails. This means slightly loosening the vang, halyards, outhaul and mainsheet and bringing the traveller car well to windward. The idea is to get the air flowing across the sail so that the leech teletales on the mainsail are flying most of the time.

The reason that you did not see these suggestions in books are that they are exactly backwards of proper sail trim. The heavy weather advise does have a historic precident. Before boom vangs, adjustable travellers and low stretch sail materials, sails were often twisted open in heavy air and it was sometimes called a ''fisherman''s reef'', but as mentioned above this is a relatively poor way to reduce heeling and balance the helm, especially when cracked off a little.

Jeff
 
#4 ·
Amen Jeff.

Basically, you want to mess with the level of the boom as a very last and very temporary action. It is a way to "spill" the wind in an extreme emergency only - i.e. a sudden squall. If it is worrying the wife, perhaps you should take a few sailing courses together. Maybe you are assuming too much and she knows it and is worried. You should shorten your sail or adjust your tack. If she doesn''t like being heeled in so many knots of wind, not mph, then perhaps you need a powerboat. In layman''s term''s, what you are describing puts way too much pressure on your standing rigging and your sail, with the end result being major failure at some point. Perhaps that is why you have never read of it being a solution. Basic physics, my man, will win out.

NOT a new sailor - over 38,000 sea miles (not including Canal, lake and ICW miles).

Please take note and good winds to you,
Mary
 
#5 ·
There are all kinds of sailing lessons. Some include only classroom instruction and perhaps a few hours of sailing on a Sunfish. In other sailing courses, a considerable amount of time will be spent sailing a sloop-rigged boat. (i.e., a boat with two sails; a mainsail and a jib.) You need sailing lessons on the general type of sailboat that you plan to sail.

If you have had any kind of sailing lessons, you have undoubtedly studied the fundamental principles of sail trim, but reading about them in a book and actually putting them to use on a boat are quite different things. It would be very helpful to you if you will volunteer to crew for an experienced sailor, and ask him/her to explain how to trim sails, while you are underway. Principles of sail trim make more sense when you can see them in actual use. Hang in there! It was all a mystery to us when we were first learning to sail.
 
#6 ·
It''s probably not worth my time. I''ll not post another idea. First of all, the heel that that troubles my wife is anything over 20 degree. We''ll sail all day at 20 degrees. At 35 degrees waters coming in the windows and I like to avoid that. Makes a mess.
The next thing for all you highly skilled sailors worrying about my main sail lufting and added strain on the mast. The degree of up-angle I''m talking about is very slight. Using a carpenters level, take the bubble just to the other side of the high line. Only a couple of degrees. The sail will stay full with no lufting or wrinkles. And I''m using it with my second reef inplace. Yes, the wind is pretty heavy. No, it''s not for beginners, thank you very much.
 
#7 ·
Here''s the point, in heavy air, you want to be blading out your mainsail, in other words, making it as flat as possible and then reducing its angle of attack. This reduces weather helm and reduces heel. To do this requires tensioning all of the controls on the mainsail (outhaul, halyard, vang, and mainsheet, and backstay- if you have an adjustble backstay) and dropping the traveler to leeward.

When you ease the vang and tension the topping lift, as you had originally suggested you are powering up the sail and twisting the sail, which increases weather helm and heeling, and reduces drive. Since this is a forum titled "Learning to Sail", I think that it was important to explain that your advice was not the best solution in heavy conditions.

If you took my comments as a personal attack, I am truly sorry. My comments were not meant as one.

Jeff
 
#8 ·
Sorry, sailorfrank, if you took advice from those more experienced as an attack. But, if you are so smart and wanting to defend your stance, pray tell why you have any portholes open for water to come through? Although you are, perhaps, day sailors with little experience, I would hope that closing the "windows" would be common sense. You''ve obviously never seen water through your portlights. Thinking like yours will lead to disaster. I am beginning to think that your initial post was a joke. If not, do yourself and your wife a favor and buy a nice little cabin cruiser.

MaryBeth
 
#9 ·
I may be bad advice, but it''s in all the sailing books: Chapman, Sailing Handbook, etc. Twist the sails to spill air off the leech and reduce heel.

It seems to me that this bit of wisdom is intended as a *temporary* measure to depower a sail. Once you have the sails properly shortened and the boat back in balance, then you can blade out, tighten up, all that stuff.
 
#10 ·
If you are going to do a temporary measure, it would make a lot more sense to drop the traveller and pull in the mainsheet or vang than it does to tension the topping lift and ease the vang, both from an improvement in sailing comfort and ease and speed standpoint.
Jeff
 
#11 ·
Jeff,

This is a little off the subject of heavy weather, but I have a question about boom vangs. My boat, a ''72 C&C 30 mk1 purchased last fall, does not have a boom vang. I have just started to consider one but I''m confused as to its use. For some reason I thought that using a vang to flatten the sail would power it up. In lighter winds and rolling seas (or ******** wakes) my boom "bounces" and this seems to reduce speed. More so with the wind behind me. Am I incorrect? I use my traveler and mainsheet to try to correct this (let the traveler out and bring the sheet in to reduce the angle of the mainsheet and put more tension on the boom).

When sailing on a beat I bring the traveler to the windward side of the boat. Is this correct?

I''m still learning and experimenting.

Thanks
 
#12 ·
Hi Rob,

I apologize in advance if I am being to basic in this description for your knowledge level. The idea of ''powering up'' or ''powering down'' is a little bit counter-intuitive at first. Even many esperienced sailors do not have a clear picture of this concept. To explain; The amount of force that a sail generates is related to the shape of the sail and its angle of attack to the wind. Angle or attack, or incident angle, is the angle of the sail to the wind. A sail that is fuller (rounder) in shape generates more lift (the term lift is used because a sail is seen as a wing on edge and because, except down wind, the drive that a sail produces pulls the boat from the low pressure side of the sail rather than pushing the sail as one might otherwise assume). The flatter the sail the less lift is generated.

A sail generates lift perpendicular to the surface of the sail with the most lift generated at the luff of the sail and next to no lift generated at the trailing edge. As a result the accumulated forces of a sail can be thought of as having three active components; Drive- which is the component of the force that acts in the forward direction of the boat, Drag which is a component that acts to reduce drive, and Heeling Forces which operate across the boat.

In an ideal sense the goal in sailing is to maximize drive while keeping the other two components under control. For any given boat, in any given conditions, there is an ideal amount of curvature (camber) in the sail and an ideal angle of attack. In light air the goal is to produce the maximum lift that you can regardless of heel angle, etc. But in heavier conditions it is possible to produce too much lift. First of all, except for planning boats, most displacement boats can only use so much drive, i.e. enough drive to push the boat at hullspeed. Second of all with the increased lift comes increased heeling and aerodynamic drag, which may actually slow a boat down and make it less safe and comfortable to sail.

So, the one critical goal in heavier air is to flatten the shape of the sail in order to reduce lift. The other goal in heavier conditions is try to make sure that the sail has the proper incident angle. When you have the sail pulled in too far the sail produces too much heeling for the amount of drive making control and comfort less than ideal.

Which brings us to twist. If you sight up a sail you will notice that if you drew a straight horizontal line from the mast to the leech of the sail these lines would not all be parallel. Some would be seen to have at a larger angle to the centerline of the boat than others. This is called twist. When you have a lot of twist in heavy air, part of the sail is over trimmed and part of the sail is often under trimmed and the result is that the part of the sail that is over trimmed is causing the boat to heel excessively.


So talking about the how this applies to actual sail trim underway. In light air you generally can tolerate more power and more twist for a variety of reasons. To power up a sail, the halyard, outhaul, backstay adjuster, and boom vang are eased. The traveler is brought high above the centerline of the boat so that the mainsheet is pulling more horizontally rather than downward. Pulling downward tends to reduce twist and flatten the sail.

As the winds increase, the force on the sail stretches the fabric and in the absence of a boom vang pulls the boom upward, both add curvature to the sail and so provide more lift, increasing drive, drag and heeling. At some point you have too much lift and so you need to flatten the sail out. On a beat you lower the traveler to leeward and tighten the mainsheet. This reduces twist, and fullness in the sail. You also tension the halyards, outhaul, backstay adjuster, and boom vang to further reduce fullness. By the times that the boat is getting overpowered you want to have a very flat sail pointed at a very flat angle to the wind. The traveler should be all the way to leeward and the mainsheet tensioned. The jib car should be slightly aft of its normal position.

When reaching, without a vang the sail wants to get a lot of twist and to power up in the gusts. This is backward of what you really want to happen. A boom vang, by keeping the boom from rising, reduces twist and so keeps the various portions of the sail at similar angles of attach to each other. This allows you to adjust the sail so that you have just the right angle of attach up and down the sail rather than have one part over trimmed and one part too eased. As a result you have less weather helm and also heel less.

For beginners it seems as if heel equals speed. Generally, heeling does not equate to greater speed. When a boat heels it generally produces greater drag, leeway and is less comfortable to move about on. Beginners usually look at an over-trimmed sail as producing more drive because it produces more heel. In a general sense an over trimmed sail does not produce more drive (or even more lift), just a greater heeling moment due to the greater sideforce of the wind impacting the sail at a deeper angle.

It is only when all of that fails to achieve a comfortable heel and rudder angle that reducing sail area becomes necessary. To keep the terms clear, depowering is reducing the power of the sail area that you have up, and reefing is reducing the area of the sail that you have up. The terms are not interchangeable.

I hope this answers your question.

Respectfully,
Jeff
 
#13 ·
Jeff I agree with everything you''ve said. There is a question in todays Sailnet on Sailtrim for excessive winds in which the expert (Don Dickson) advocates doing what you are saying but also inducing twist as a temporary measure.

"Ask yourself beforehand, is the halyard tight enough? Is the outhaul taut and the cunningham tight? How about the vang? If the vang is tight on this point of sail, you can relieve a lot of the pressure on the upper leech of the mainsail by easing the vang tension just before the force of the puffs hit. Of course start by easing the sheets and then use the vang. It''s sort of a secondary control for these instances, but very effective if the wind is strong enough to overpower the amount of sail you have up."


Not that I agree or disagree as you mentioned previuosly with the "Fisherman''s Reef"...Just wanted to bring up the point. I really think it depends on your boat. Everyone boat handles a little bit different.
 
#14 ·
I really think that that quote is referring to a very subtle adjustment that makes sense for race boats in a very narrow band of conditions. For cruisers which cannot burn off speed by planning or surfing when they are over powered and where sail stretch happens automatically, there would be few instances where where easing the vang makes sense.

On most boats with dacron sails, there is sufficient stretch in the sail that the sail automatically increases in draft and twist. But on boats with lower stretch high tech fabrics you can more effectively use twist to depower the boat a little without powering the sail up. As he says, it is a secindary adjustment. I don''t think it is very effective compared to leaving the vang quite tight and allowing the traveller and the sheet be eases to change incident angle.

This is an easy thing to experiment with and try out for yourself. If you go out on a breezy day with another person, take turns steering. Set the jib for the conditions and then steer by the jib teletales. Have the other person try bringing the traveller to windward a bit and easing the mainsail to the point where it is about to luff and feel the helm. Then ease the traveller and bring the mainsheet in tighter and feel that. Go through a number of cycles and feel the difference. Similarly put the boat on a beam reach and try easing and tightening the vbang while adjusting the mainsheet so that the sail is not luffing. At least on a tiller steered boat or a boat with minimal friction in the steering system the loads should be obvious. Even with a boat that has wheel steering you should be able to see the amount that the wheel is turned.

Respectfully
Jeff
 
#15 ·
In the begining I did think that more heel = more speed. Till I learned a couple of hard lessons this spring getting hammered as wind speed increased and I was not prepared. Now I reef earlier :) Am I correct to think that a boom vang will allow me a little more windspeed before having to reef?

Another question; When I am on a beat, sailing as close to the wind as I can, I bring the traveler all the way in to the windward side and tighten the mainsheet as much as I can. It seems that I lose speed but can sail closer to the wind. Also the jib luffs a little at this point no matter how much I try to bring it in. Am I gaining anything? Would it be better just to tack?

Thanks,
 
#16 ·
Hi Rob,

Depending on the point of sail, you are correct that a boom vang will allow you to reef at a slightly higher wind speed, but even before you have to reef, it can help reduce weather helm and heeling. This is especially true when power reeching in a range of wind angle between cracked off a beat to just below a beam reach. In that range of wind angles the boat has a tendancy to heel a lot and get unbalanced. The boom should be eased to the point that the mainsheet is no longer pulling downward at a nearly vertical angle. Without a vang you would need to have the boom in far enough that you aren''t luffing but in doing so you would have a lot of twist and the lower part of the sail would be overtrimmed. Using a vang you can remove this twist and so the sail would have a proper angle of attach up and down the sail. Without the overtrimmed lower portion of the sail the boat will be more comfortable, faster, and have less helm which at some point in the wind speed range means reefing later.

On your second question you are asking about one aspect of shifting gears. You can sail a boat so that it wants to point higher but sails slower (pinching) or you can sail lower and go faster (footing off). There are reasons to use both in specific applications but as a general rule, the fastest way up wind is neither footing nor pinching, but at a point in between. On your boat the Jib is the prime mover upwind and so if your jib is luffing even a little you are clearly pinching. You are better off easing the boom to the centerline of the boat and allowing both sails to really do their thing. In the mainsail you should have ''yarns'' at each batten tip (actually slightly above or below the batten works best) and these teletales should all be flying aft when the mainsail is trimmed correctly. In moderate to light conditions its not too bad to have the upper most batten yarn occasionally stalled and sucked into the leeward leech of the sail.

Your genoa trim is limited by the shroud attachment points and so is the limiting factor in how high you can efficiently point upwind. So to answer your question, If you are only overtrimming the mainsail for a couple boat lengths to perhaps get around an obstruction pinching probably makes sense, but if you are sailing some longer distance, trimming for a balance speed and pointing, makes better sense even if it means taking an extra tack or two.
Good luck out there.
Regards
Jeff
 
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#17 ·
I've been away for a while. Sailing, traveling, working, etc. Re-reading some of my old posts from my first couple of years sailing and got to this one... BUMP...

What great advice on basic sail trim from JeffH. Looking back, I had no idea how much it was worth when I was reading it :D
 
#20 ·
just a mention that when i was taking a sailing course and on the tiller. i started to feel that the boat was being overpowerd---i got a little panicky at the time and kept trying to pinch to stop the heeling that worked but my instructer told me I was pinching again--it did level off the boat but was not what I should have have been doing. After some real thought later i came to the conclusion that when I could have asked the other crewmember to let out the traveller and we would have levelled off a bit. Would this be correct??
 
#21 · (Edited)
Yes, but it sorta depends on what else was going on at the time. If you were indeed pinching, then headed down a bit (as your instructor suggested) and the boat begins to heel again- if you let the traveller down, the boat will level off as the main is depowered. There are several other controls that may precede that, though- tighten outhaul, and maybe the vang, and possibly backstay tension as well, all before dropping the traveller. We use the traveller as a next to last resort before dumping the main (using mainsheet) in progressively heavier breeze and bigger puffs.
 
#22 ·
I am VERY glad to see Jeff H is extremely consistent, and as always spot on informative.

Yep, you let the boom up going upwind by easing vang, and you're asking for a huge bag of trouble (literally) to slap you down good when you get a gust. Flatten that beast up good with vang, and you can dump the traveler in the oscillations, and dump the mainsheet in the gusts, the vang will keep the boom from skying.

We spent most of yesterday doing JUST this in our local race. We were overpowered for sure, full up main, and 155... 3 aboard... winds were supposed to be 8-16mph but gusts were to 30+ The trick to being the fastest boats was to use sail area for the low speed winds (as they were more often than not) but to quickly depower in the gusts. We used the vang to hold the boom in place upwind so I could remove the mainsail influence when we'd get a +15 dumping the traveler wasn't enough! if that vang wasn't on, we'd have been broaching with each ease of the mainsheet! The trick was to depower as the gusts hit to say on our feet... we'd maintain speed all through the gust... and they stacked up around points and coves, so you'd be hauling/easing/hauling to keep the same speed. It was a flailing fest to stay ahead of the fastest boats.

Race... You'll learn all kinds of crazy stuff that works!
 
#24 ·
Lance mid boom or not, if you snug the vang, and you let the mainsheet out, the boom won't rise. If you release the vang, and let the mainsheet out, the boom will rise with however much pressure is in the sail. Think of the vang as a boom lift preventer (as it swivels around the base of the mast, so it doesn't care what angle of attack you are on, it always stops the boom from lifting). The key is to know when you want to keep that boom down, and when (and how much) you would want to let it out to let the boom lift (generally off wind and in lighter air).

Ideally there will always be as much upward force on the boom as downward (spare the flogging better sailors than me I know that's never the case). It's why boomkickers are used (or rigid vangs)... it allows the sailor to always get consistent lift, or drop depending on the setting of the vang (regardless of wind conditions).

Example: In yesterdays race we were off wind, and surfing (defined by me as being well over theoretical hull speed for the boat, with our own wake crashing into our stern, rolling into the cockpit through the scuppers)... on a reach to broad reach. We forgot to ease the vang some after we rounded our windward mark... once we realized it, a competitor who was trailing us (a boat length or 2) had quickly fallen behind when we cracked off on the vang a bit to allow the boom to rise ever so slightly (4-6 inches at the aft end). It provided easily another .2 to .3 knots (which is substantial when you are trying to gain distance on a heavier and faster boat with more waterline in those conditions).
 
#25 ·
I was out in that same wind SHNOOL, with my family on our Catalina 22. North wind had to be 20 knots gusting to 30 on the river with nasty chop so we eventually came in and called it a day. Uneventful, but not the sail we wanted for sure. We don't have a boom vang, but I plan on installing one for next year. I stupidly did not reef and tried to sail on just the main and she did it but slow with a lot of drama and heeling which my wife didn't like. I think it would have been better to have reefed the main, tightening the sail up some more to depower it and then use the jib.
 
#27 ·
Another consideration is wind speed and sometimes direction can be quite different at different heights. The frictional effect of the waves ( or land if coastal ) is mainly responsible. Flat is fast. Reef early and often is faster and you have less sail in less wind.
Some argue that you may need a fuller sail to "power" of a lee shore as you have less wind in the troughs and more on the peaks when a significant sea is running. Many argue one of the disadvantages of single line reefing or in boom reefing is you get a very flat sail once reefed. So far I haven't found this a problem. My first two reefs are single line but for this reason third reef is double lined.
 
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