In this video, Andrew and Albie discuss the basics of sail trimming and controlling the power of the sails. They cover a range of topics including mainsheet adjustment, traveler control, backstay tension, Cunningham adjustment, and twist control. They also address specific scenarios, such as adjusting controls when the wind drops, and trimming for higher and slower sailing. Overall, they emphasize the importance of balance and making adjustments to suit the conditions. The video is part of a series of webinars that will continue to cover different aspects of sailing.
Key Insights:
– This video is a webinar discussing sailing techniques and controls.
– The main controls discussed are the mainsheet, traveler, backstay, Cunningham eye, and boom vang.
– The mainsheet is used to control power and adjust the angle of attack.
– The traveler is set according to the conditions and helps control power.
– The backstay is a vital tool for controlling power and adjusting the mast bend.
– The Cunningham eye controls the draft and shape of the sail.
– The boom vang is important for controlling twist, especially when sailing downwind.
– Late ribbons and luff ribbons are important indicators of sail performance.
– It’s important to prioritize and adjust these controls based on the conditions and goals.
– Adjustments should be made with consideration for the entire sail setup and its impact on performance.
Transcript
Well, welcome everybody, thanks for joining us today. That is different, wait a week of a very steep learning curve, trying to look at how all this goes, so please be patient with us. I really like to say thank you to the north’s and Andrew and Albee for joining us because I think what we have planned over the next few weeks will actually be was engaged at home and also helped us be in a better position when we actually get out on the water. Now, for those of you that are new to Zoom webinars and meetings, what we’ve done with this webinar is we’ve actually muted all the attendees. That’s because, you know, if we have had over 100 people register and if everybody’s trying to talk at the same time, it just becomes chaos. What we would like, however, if we go through the presentation, we’d really like your questions along the way. So if you look at the bottom of your screen in the middle there, you’ll see something that says „check.“ If you open that up, you’ll be able to type in a question. And then Albie and I are monitoring the question and as they come through and we’ll be working out a good time to just lock that question in.
So, our plan today is, you know, how these talks gonna take—I mean, Andrews talk— you know, he’s about 20 minutes or so and I suspect with questions and things, it might go on a little bit longer. So anyway, sit back, enjoy, and I’m gonna hand over you anything. Thanks very much Karen and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Welcome to the first raw Sydney Yacht Squadron and webinar in conjunction with no sales. I’m Andrew parks, been garroted, Alby prep school, so joining us, our subject today is main switch room. So we’re gonna start with some of the fundamentals to all of those of you who are a bit more advanced, so I apologize in advance, but we just want to get all the basics covered so that when we’re using some terminology, everyone who’s watching is across it and they can all benefit from it. And as an old friend of one of my first bosses, Mike Fletcher, Tommy, you always really learn something when you go sailing. So all of those who know about this, it’s just another chance to reinforce what you already know.
So as we discussed, there is a chatroom, so if you’ve got the first feel free to ask, we’ll do our best to answer them as we go. But if your question doesn’t get answered at the time because we’ve moved on to the next subject, don’t panic. We’ll come back to you at the end of the presentation. So, to help us today, we’re using the north sails darling Simeone simulator. It’s based on a j35, which should make you pretty happy, Malcolm, and all the numbers that are derived from the VPP so they’re real numbers. So when we make a change, it’s actually done on real data. So a couple of little things that we’re getting a few terms we only use today the first will be late ribbons. And if you look at the top of the mountain there, those two red ribbons that are flying now. I missed it have been flying all the time. Late help us determine whether the sail is over-trained. It’s not flying to the stylist or the next damn thing you see is javi the simulator. Are you kidding? I’ve got the slides. Okay, it’s up now. No. Oh, you’re kidding. We have tested this everybody a couple of times we’re trying to be a little too fancy.
So we had the North sales symbol when your screen welcome to those that have just joined us. If you’ve got any questions as we deliver them, please into violet that’s it function down below back to you, Andrew. Okay, the practice never seems to work on the day. Okay, so as we discussed, we’ve got our lecture bins up at the table. The main song, and we’re going to be using them quite a bit in our illustrations. You’ll see three stripes white stripes on the south. We call these draft stripes, and they help us determine the depth of the sail and where that is. So the first term we use is cord, and the cord length is from where the site where the stripe touches the mast all the way to where it touches the Lynch. And so, we use that as the overall length, and then we use percentages of that.
So when we look at the deepest part of the sail, we can see it’s just around 40%, and that is the draft position. And then the last thing we talked about is the camber, and the camber is the depth of the sound. So if we took a straight line from the left to the leech and then measure down from that straight line to the point on the sail, that’s a percentage as well. So we’re using these as a guide to learn what each adjustment is and what it does to our styling. So I just thought I’d cover that because we’ll be referring to it throughout the course of the day. And if everyone in the room isn’t across it, you know, some people may lose a little bit of the presentation. So, basically, there are three sources of power from your sails, angle of attack, so depth, and twist. Our total power in our sails is a sum each source.
So looking at that first thing angle of attack. Angle of attack increases as we trim ourselves on all we bear off. So in the animation, we can’t go all the way up to head to wind, so we’ve got the boat sailing as high as it can at 35 degrees. As we bear off, we see the boat speed increase, and we’re slowly getting faster and faster and faster. Now we’re sort of an optimum angle, but if we continue to bear away with the sails still trimmed on and don’t register trim as we come away, we see the lute ribbon start to form, and the sail is stalled. So that means that we’ve actually got the sail trim too hard for the angle of we’re sailing, means that we need to adjust. So as we come back up closer to the breeze, the trim runs the angle, and we’re selling properly again.
The next thing that adjusts our power is depth. So the deeper we make the sail, the more powerful it is. And we’re always searching for to maximize our power to suit the conditions. So one way to increase power is to increase depth. So again, if we look at our lecture beds at the top, as we use the backstay, we can see that if we look at the stripes, we can see these are getting deeper and deeper until eventually it starts stores. If we go too far, we make the sail too deep. We can see all this depth up here. The sail is inefficient, and it’s completely stalled. The third power source is twist. I’m going to use a different angle to show you this, but basically when we twist the signs at ease, the sails off and increase the amount of twist, we reduce power. So if we ease the mainsheet here, we can see the boat stand up as we reduce the power. And then as we turn the mainsheet back on, twist reduces.
We’re putting more power in the boat, and the boat heels over. So these are the three principles that we’re always aiming for. We’re trying to use the right angle of attack, the right amount of depth, and the right amount of twist to give us the maximum amount of power and be efficient. You know, you can’t be efficiently fast if you’re too deep. There’s just too much drag. So it’s a compromise between angle, depth, twist, and keeping the right drag profile so that we’re not too slow. Our first sail control is a mainsheet, which we sort of covered in the twisting. As we can see here, as we’ve got nice angle of heel there, as we use the mainsheet, the boat stands up. As we trim the mainsheet back on, we put more Halelong. Now, let’s have a look at it from where you guys are on the boat. So as the mainsheet comes on, we can see the top lid trevins if we trim too hard and you I’m sure you’ve all seen this. There’s our stalls. So when you when you see a stall, you always have to trim a little bit and get those lute ribbons flowing.
Our next sail control is our traveler. I mean, taken another view of this, and our traveler is used to give set the power for the conditions. In very light conditions, we might pull the traveler up to Winwood and give us more power because we’re searching for it. If it’s a bit windy, we might drop the puck, the traveler down a bit, and keep it in that lower position. And then we use our mainsheet to control our power from that point on. So set the traveler for the conditions, and then I like to use the mainsheet. It’s a much more responsive way of trimming than doing it all with the traveler. And next, and probably one of the more important tools that we have when we’re sailing is our backstay. And if we have a look from on board again, what the mate will tremor in the halyard is we’ll be looking at as we bring our backstay on, we bend the mast. And that makes the sail flatter. As we use the backstay off, the mast trails and the main still gets deeper. So this is a really good tool.
I’m sure that you all adjust your backstays quite regularly when you’re racing. It’s a great tool to control your power for the initiative and to give you a different view of this. We look from the masthead. I don’t think any of us have seen yourself from this angle before. Personally, I’ve seen lots of photos. So if we look at our mast here, as the backstay comes on the mast bends, and the boat gets flatter. When we get some lighter air, where’s our backstay mask? It’s straighter, and the mate will get deeper. So we just have to use the backstay to adjust the power that we need. So again, it’s all about controlling the power, having the right amount of power for the conditions. Our last one of our last controls in the animations is our cunningham eye. And what we do, the cunningham eye helps us control where the draft is in the sail. So if we look at our sails, nicely set up and if you look in the second box down in the top left-hand corner, you’ll see a bunch of numbers.
I’m just going to change this. We’re going to— okay, middle. If we look at the main middle, we have 39% draft. So the draft is 39% back along that chord length as we discussed. And then from the straight line down to the sail, we’re looking at a depth of 11.8%. And these are all relative to this overall length of the chord. So we always refer to numbers that are always based on the chord. So if we look at that number now, we’ve got our draft at 39%. That’s a pretty nice setup. That’s a pretty nice setup. But as we pull the cunningham on, we do two things. We drag the draft forward in the sail, and that happens as the wind decreases, the draft will naturally want to go after, but we also flatten the sail.
So if you look at the middle stripe on the animation, as we pull the cunningham eye on, we can see the sail getting more drive forward, so the draft has now gone forward to 33%, almost, you know, quite close to love. But the other thing that’s important, if you look at the stripe from about 40% off. You can see how straight the exit is and how straight the leech is. So then, if you keep watching that same stripe as we ease the cunningham off, the draft goes aft and the shape returns to a more even, a little bit more curvature in the leech, which is what we need when we are searching for power and lottery. And as we tension the line again, we can see the leech straightening out and being more efficient as the wind gets up there. The animations that we can cover with our simulator, but there’s still a couple of other controls that I can’t show you on this. We don’t have that tool available. But they’re very important. The first is your outhaul, and it has a lot of controls. The bottom third of your mainsail. So obviously, we tighten the outhaul to flatten the main when we have too much power.
And then we ease the outhaul to make the mainsail deeper. And I’m sure all the Helmsman out there has been sailing along, and when the wind gets light and when the breeze gets light, you lose the power in the boat and the helm on the boat by easing the bottom of the outhaul quickly. That rounds up the lower part of the mainsail, gives you more power in the foot, but the main thing is it actually gives you more return in the leech and more power in that bottom part of the sail. And that’s what gives you helm because when the helm comes off the boat, the boat starts to sag to Lord, and you lose your heart. That’s a really important adjustment. Again, one that good mates with trimmers use all the time, particularly if the conditions are changing. The next control that we can’t show you on this is the boom vang. There’s a little bit of a glitch with our notes. So I’m just going to talk you through this.
The boom vang is used to control the twist when we go downwind because obviously, as we ease the mainsheet, the boom wants to go up in the air. So we need to use our boombang to control downwind twist. The best thing to do is use your leech ribbons as a guide, and also get underneath the boom, look up, look up, and eyeball the top buttons and make sure the last part of the top button is no more closed than parallel with the vang. Same sort of things we’re looking at when we go up. So, and obviously, if it’s windy, you need someone to play the back the vang going down because if you have too much power in the bank and you ease the mainsheet and the bank is still on, the boat will broach. And I think most of us have been through that still area. It’s not great. It’s not a lot of fun. So the only other time we use the vang is for mainsheet and there are some boats that don’t have a traveler or there’s someone designs where they prefer that method of shredding the mainsail.
In that situation, what we do is we use the vang to control twist, like we did with the mainsheet in the earlier animation, and then we control the power with the mainsheet. So instead of using your traveler, rocking your traveler a bit, you actually use the mainsheet and look, this works for…this works pretty well for smaller boats. It’s not such a big deal on yachts generally. The vang system isn’t strong enough, and it, you know, just, you put too much…well, put too much prepend in the bottom of the mast. But, you know, it does work on water boats. So that’s really covered all our basics, and Albie, do we have any questions?
At this point, we haven’t. But I’ll start a couple off. So, if you could eat just one control, what’s your first go-to control of your Sally in Sydney Harbor, and it’s a very shifty day, aside from the mainsheet. What you go to, what should you get to at first if it’s shifting next day?
The backstay has the most control. You can do power up now, really easily with it. And one thing that we didn’t touch on, and I’m not going to spend too much time on because we will discuss it when we talk about headsail trim. But the benefit of the backstay is, as you pull it on, and it bends the mast, it flattens the mainsail. But it also tightens the forestay, and it makes the jib, the headsail, flatter. So, you know, you’re getting…you’re getting two sails being affected by one adjustment. So that’s probably my go-to. If I had only one, it’d be the best thing.
Okay. And maybe touch…I’m very important with the thing change to have someone decide to bang at all times.
Yes, yeah, yeah. Protect you definitely. So again, you know, bang sheeting works really well, but we’ve all been in the situation where you’re sailing up when you’re on port, you might be looking around, and the guy the lord of your tack on starboard. You’ve got to go behind it, you know, you’re the give way boat now. If you go to get behind another boat and you’re on port and you don’t let the mainsheet off, you’re going to knock, you won’t be able to pull away, and there’s a good chance you’ll run into the other boat. The same applies to the bang. If you’ve un-sheeted and you just don’t…you don’t have the vang ready to ease, you’ll lose the mainsheet to a point, but the thing will still be holding the leech down, and it’ll make you round up, and you’ll probably have a collision. So if you do bang sheet, make sure you’re attentive on the beam because it’s just like dummy the main when you’re torguing on another boat.
Alright, so, Andrew, so what would you say is your power up and then de-power cycle?
I can’t look, basically. I like to get everything pretty well set up for the day. So get your backstay right, get your out-haul right set your cunningham and then wait. I tend to use the mainsheet and if the boat’s balanced and everything’s going well on a 40-foot yacht if you’re dialed in you should only be easing an inch or two of the mainsheet and in the gust, but but you know if once she gets the point where you, you’re starting to use too much mainsheet and you need to, you know, pull the backstay on a bit flatten the mainsail, you if you if you still struggling, drop a drop an inch of travel, but I like to keep the traveler you know pretty static because if you go through a light patch, you can’t just you don’t just want the main on you, you’ve got to bring the traveler up as well, and a lot of boats, you know, the traveler systems aren’t perfect, and you lose time doing it. So if you can do it with the mainsheet, that’s my preferred way.
But then obviously, the backstay is you know, is Manic’s go-to.
Okay. What about…what about for boats? A lot of boats don’t have the ability to set Cunningham.
Yeah, look, that’s a good question Albee, and it happens a lot, you know, a lot about…So, I go sailing on people wanting to help you though and to the…to the conditions to suit the upwind conditions. The problem with that, and if you don’t have a Cunningham eye on your boat then, you’re racing, I would go down at worst send a few dollars and make a basic Andy belly purchase system the shackles onto you under your bottom, you guys think. And if you have a purchase system, most sails will have an eyelet or a piece of webbing on them to put a Cunningham on. But the reason you use a Cunningham rather than a halyard is if you want the main halyard up to suit up wind as soon as you go around the top mark and set your spinnaker, once the sails up, the pit person then has to ease the main halyard because it’s too tight for going downwind. So instead of concentrating on what you should be doing, which is trimming and looking at the wind, you’re fiddling around with the maintain. So most sales, if they’re designed correctly, are designed to go to your band and if they have one, and have a little bit of excess Li’ef length. So you have to use a Cunningham eye when you’re going upwind, and then when you go in the top mark you blow the Cunningham off the Lothian, the tension goes off the sail, the jib gets deeper, and it’s less distractions for the rest of the crew.
There’s a question here, so when’s the best time if you do need to make those vane and backstay adjustments? You know, when on your…well, when’s the best time to be making those adjustments on your bang and your best day?
Oh, you know, if you’re on a 40-footer, a sign or an any sailor 21-footer. But, you know, they’re much harder to adjust on a bigger boat. So do you need to be adjusting them going through the tack? Or when you’re sailing downwind with minutes, load off it?
Hey, look, things like the backstay, a lot of it depends on the system the boat has. A smaller boat, you know, something like a Beneteau 36.7, like Jeff Davidson’s boat, it has a purchase system, a cascading booster system. So that’s really quick and easy to adjust. So you know, you pull on a handful of backstay in the back of those. It comes up quickly. Other boats other boats have got a hydraulic RAM. And if you’ve got a boat where that’s all you’ve got on an electric pump on the RAM, that’s quite quick. So you can trim on and these quite quickly. But more often than not, the vang is just centered in the bottom of the transom and someone has to go back and pump it up, but not as easy on those boats. So you tend to…tend to try and get the settings pretty right, and then it’s only if you’re going to a…you know, a drastic change in wind strength, you know, the major trimmer might pop to the back of the boat and dump a little bit of backstay off. cunninghams a little bit more of a static thing, most of your yachts tend not to bang sheet but mainsheet is…is the big one. You can make a huge difference in the amount of power in the boat just but for me the mainsheet is the most important. Alright? So telltale’s and…and lute ribbons on the vane…are they useful?
Useful? Yes.
Yes okay. Essential?
Essential, yes.
Essential okay. Right men, particularly the lute ribbons, you know, they…they will tell you more about what’s happening than anything else. And as we sort of as we discussed earlier, if the sail stalls, there’s no wind attached to the luff. So we need then…we need the air to flow around both sides of both sides. So that is the lute ribbons are a really good guide. And you know they are the go-to, walking tufts are handy but late ribbons are probably the most critical thing. So if you don’t have them, go down to Whitworth. You can buy them in a packet. We’ll take your sail ties or maybe gun ask you to send them to you but yeah you should have a couple of them. I like to have, you know, at least at least three or four, but if you’ve only got one, you know, one on each of your top buttons that’s fine too. If you haven’t got any, if you ever got any legends on your main, just send myself or Andrew an email and we’ll we’ll get some out in the in the mail to you next week. And you could be able to just stick them on yourself next time you’re out, whatever whenever that may be. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, a question from yeah what what order priority would you adjust controls as you come into the Lord mark?
Good questions something that I struggle with a lot when I’m on the main sheet try to get it really done.
Yeah.
Especially when you’re coming in quick.
Look it’s I guess the priorities are, you know, the things that are hard to adjust once we’ve got, you’ve gone around the mark. So I think my priority for me in the main is I like to get the pit person because generally they will do it to preset the Appel, and that’s a really important one they post it for the up Wiggly. If you are in the bottom mark with the Arroloff, you slow as a wet weekend and you know some of that all of you all claim to need to get a fallback on it quickly that rounds up the lower part of the main cell gives you more power in the boom. So, but the main thing is it actually gives you more opening in the leech and more power in that bottom part of the sail, and that’s what gives you home because when the home comes off the boat, the boat starts to sag to to Lord. And you lose your heart, that’s a really important adjustment one that good mates and trimmers use all the time, particularly if the conditions are changing.
Yeah.
The next control that we can’t show you on this is the traveler. There’s a little bit of a glitch with our notes. So, I’m just going to talk through that. The traveler is used to, you know, give, set the power for the for the conditions. In very light conditions, we might pull the traveler up to Winwood and give us more power because we’re searching for it. If it’s a bit windy, we might drop the buck, the traveler down a bit, and keep it in that lower position, and then we use our mainsheet to control our power from that point on. So set the traveler for the conditions, and then I like to use the mainsheet. It’s much more responsive way of trimming than doing it all with the traveler.
And next, and probably one of the more important tools that we have when we’re sailing is our backstay. And if we have a look from from on board again, what the mate whill trimer in the hale yard is we’ll be looking at as we bring our backstay on, we bend the mast, and that makes the sail flatter. As we use the backstay off, the mast trail’s on the main still gets deeper. So this is a really good tool. I’m sure that you all adjust your backstays quite regularly when you’re racing. It’s a great tool to control your power for the initiative and to give you a different view of this. We look from the masthead. I don’t think any of us has seen this film from this angle before. Personally, I’ve seen lots of photos. So if we look at our mast here, as the backstay comes on, the mast bends, and the boat gets flatter. When we get some lighter air, where’s our backstay mass is straighter, and the mainsail gets cheaper. So we just have to use the backstay to adjust the power that we need. So, again, it’s all about controlling the power, having the right amount of power for the conditions.
Our last one of our last controls in the animations is our cunningham eye. And what we do, the cunningham eye helps us control where the draft is in the sail. So if we look at our sails nicely set up and if you look in the second box down in the top left-hand corner, you’ll see a bunch of numbers. I’m just going to change this. We’re going to — okay, middle. If we look at the main mile, we have 39% draft. So the draft is 39% back along that chord length as we discussed. And from the straight line down to the sail, we’re looking at a depth of 11.8%. And these are all relative to this overall length of the chord. So we always refer a numbers are always based on the chord. If we look at that number now, we’ve got our draft at 39%. That’s a pretty nice setup. But as we pull the cunningham on, we do two things. We drag the draft forward in the sail, and it happens as the wind decreases, the draft will naturally want to go after. But we also flatten the sail. So if you look at the middle stripe on the animation, as we pull the cunningham eye on, we can see the sail getting more drive forward. So the draft has now gone forward to 33% almost quite close to love. But the other thing that’s important, if you look at the stripe from about 40% off. You can see how straight the exit is and how straight the leech is. If we go to a scenario when it’s bumpy, and the sail is trimmed on too hard, the sail will stall too quickly. So when it’s bumpy, you need to keep the sails more twisted, you know, keep your traveller up, ease the sheet a bit more.
So let’s take a look at some scenarios, here when we’re coming off the start line, and we want to come off the start line, and keep our position, and not get squeezed off by a guide to lured. We want to sell a bit higher and slower. So how do we do that? Well, you can’t just pull the traveller up, because you’re going to…All you’re doing is blowing the boat down and stall in the summersail, which we were just talking about. So how do we do that? Well, there’s a couple things you can do. So right now we’re selling at 41.7 degrees, and it is so nice, you know, nice conditions. And everything’s going pretty pretty well. We’ve got the ball speed of 6.4. As we bear off slowly, you can see the boat stands up well, the helm goes light, we’re down to 12 knots of breeze. So what did we do? How do we add power to the boat? The first thing we do is we bring our traveller up. So as we bring our traveller up, you see that our home is coming back on. Now, we ease backstain, but if we use the backstain and then look at our sale, what’s happened to the lid ribbons, it all thought. Because that’s such a drastic change, we need to afterwards with an adjustment on the Main Street as well. So then what we do is we use our mainsheet, we outturn until we don’t have…we just don’t…We’re just flying again, and we’re back. So, I guess I’m saying here, guys, is if you get a light patch, you can’t just…aren’t the backstay, and so all I’ve done my job. You’ve got to look at what that impact has on the rest of the sail and the rest of the performance. I haven’t seen that so now already, I think one would be doing is easy eating the apple because that gives you a good punch about quite quickly. So look, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s just a reminder for the Helmsman and the trimmers out there that you need to think about everything for every action. You know, there’s a react, and so don’t just sit and forget, but when you adjust something, just be mindful that those dynamic changes have adjusted the sails.
