Revisiting the Circle of Five in Sailing on the Water!

Revisiting the Circle of Five in Sailing on the Water! This is the good, old-school methodology which teaches pupils to be observant of 5 main considerations. You take this as a check list, and run it as a circle, starting over and over again. It should become more and more intuitive, but familiarity does breed contempt or hinder your learning curve later on! The order I take is as follows for good reason - Course to Sail, Sail Setting, Trim, Balance/heel, and alternatives for No 5 we will come back to. Let us Revisit these to see what we can gain from a new appraisal to improve our racing or cruising 1. Course to Sail This is the primary concern! Numero Uno! But back up here. Where we want to sail and where we can sail as an immediate course, are two very different things. The latter is often refered to as tack or heading. "Course to sail" is then the best immediate direction to sail in, for the best velocity made good towards a goal. It is the best current heading relative to gains towards our next goal or waypoint, given we have the correct sail settings etc. So on a beat-to-windward we have two coniderations - opimtal height and boat speed makes for good VMG, but do we have a favoured tack ie on one tack, will we reach the goal quicker than the opposite? Given open water with a bouy to round, or a headland to aim for as a good example of making a passage, then we should know the bearing DDW from the goal to our starting position, extended as a line perpendicular to this starting point to the wind. We can then very quickly calculate which tack is favoured from the chart, or know how, and then by following the compass if the wind direction is varying. A point about racing, many get wrong. With a start line positioned up wind or offset from the leeward mark, the initial bias from the line to the windward mark may be different from the wind bias W-L marks over the longer race course. So you may be clever and assess the line bias coming head to wind, or using the tack and reach with sails set, but have you considered doing the same on the line W-L ? Many yachties I know complain about " we went the wrong side on the second beat" and this is often due to either this oversight, or because the wind has changed and no one has assessed its true direction on round two. Cruising wise, the issue can be that you tack too far on the unfavoured tack- and this can be especially detrimental to overall progress if you tack into a bay. While enjoying a good sail, it is easy to not notice you are actually sailing into a wide bay, which will then restrict your progress towards the headland you need to round. You just dont see the concave nature of the bay and you end up having to fall off to avoid the curved side towards your goal. What you should have done, was identified that the side of the "diamond" taking you fastest to the mark was outside the bay more directly to the headland, and you should have done smaller tacks when necessary on the small side of the diamond, the unfavoured one that is, until you lay the headland, then tack onto the lay line for it or just above. The other consideration apart from wind bias towards goal on the beat, is the conditions. How are tide, wind and waves going to affect your progress ? Are there any expected changes in wind stregnth and directioon forecasted, or clear to see in the sky and on the water? When you get into understanding convergent breeze on a coast, or lifts round a headland and so on, then this gives you more to play with no matter which point of sail you are on. Those are a bit beyond explaining , but the point I am making hereis that shortest is not always fastest. So two examples from sailing in the Sound of Mull, a well know cauldron of fighting winds due to the surrounding hills and lochs. One time in light winds we noticed a larger boat ahead while Fetching, had stopped up. The fetch was the shortest route , making for otherwise boring racing in a procession. However the other boat was in a hole in the wind. Possibly a mid channel annuleration..anyway it was clear to see that there was wind along our shore to the west of them, and we duly sailed a banana round them, us being in a 28ft boat, their's being a Bene FC Europe around 37ft long! Another example was noting the wind was building on the Mull shore, but getting there meant a very unfavoured tack, almost sailing away from our goal. Yet it got us the lead by 10 boat lengths over our competitors who didnt tack over into it, but waited it to come down to them on the favoured tack. Which takes us nicely to reaching and running and sail setting. Very often the shortest route to sail DDW is not the fastest. In other words your boat may make better VMG for the wind and wave conditions with a higher or lower course. Then there is tide as a consideration too. Will it hinder or help? How much gain or pain will you need to take? Another very valid point when both cruising and racing under spinnaker is " are we going the right way?" We are having such a lovely time, or everyone else are flying theirs, maybe we can roll over someone? When the goal is higher than you can sail with a spinnaker, then take the darn thing down and fetch to your goal! In some very fast boats , for example a planing dinghy or a Melges, it may pay to blast down wind to then need to even beat up to your goal in terms of made good overall ground and velocity. Or for example, you may aim low to avoid tide when cruising, taking the hit when the boat is on white sails again. 2. Sail Settings Moving on nicely on the last point, the question is- do you have the sail set correctly in terms of your next goal or waymark? Are you in fact, a slave to sail setting and forgetting about the course which will be most effective? That is really all I will say on this point in relation to course. Sail settings and trimming them are all part of courses, text books and your own experience. I write this blog more about seeing the bigger picture. Any perfect sail setting will take you there, if you dont know where you are going- to paraphrase Otherwise if you want to improve your sail settings beyond initial schooling , then you have to consider first your rig settings and tuning. In principle most modern boats have the big controls, sheets, kicker back stay.( so as an example of out-of sight-out-of mind - I often forget back stay is an important control - it firstly stabilises the rig with tension ( esp' frac' rig with swept back spreaders) then bends the mast, especially the top third, thus flattening the main a bit and opening the top by shortening the leach triangle- thus an important control!) Other minor tweaks in running rigging set up are good to get right once you have the correct settings otherwise. This can be a circle within the big 5 circle, and often sorting one thing out requires adjustment in another setting. For example usually cunningham and kicker should be played together to get the best open and flat sail. But in being reflective on the principle of checking your sails you need another little circle including things like in haulers and back stay. That is a topic for textbooks not here! But remember- you are forgetting something! There is always one more thing when you think you are completely in line! 3. Trim and 4. Balance I take these together very much in the same light as Sail Settings. DO you really understand what makes your boat faster, or indeed slower in balance laterally across the boat, ie heel and do you understand trim fore-aft ? 5. Five is centerboard posisiton in dinghy sailing. However you can well take it as relative to other boats in a race, or collision courses or nasty things that go bump in the night. How do you plan ahead to avoid these without taking too much pain ie course away from your goal? In the game of chess that is racing, will you lose a pawn to take a checkmate on the next tack? ========================
Summary What I am trying to impress upon you here is that there is a mind set of continuously checking what is going on both in the boat and out the boat. How can we get there most effectively, quickly or comfortably? Do we have optimal settings, trim and balance for the current course and conditions ? What is the weather, sea and tide going to do with us over the forthcoming time we want to sail in? The "big 5" in dinghy sailing, or modified as above for keelers, is a cyclical list of things to go through and all go hand in hand with each other. Eventually much of this becomes intuitive, but try going back to COURSE-SAIL-BALANCE-TRIM-(Obstacles / tactic avoidance) as a discipline even if much of sailing comes intuitively to you- remembering my forgotten backstay, out of my line of sight, in the forgetting book!! There isnt really a distinction between cruising and racing here. Racing is just a test of sailing around a common defined course with some rules to further avoid collision and aggro than cruising!
Eventually this round of checking becomes intuitive itself. The start point then is often, hmm, are we going optimally? Why are other boats faster? Where I am i sailing on this heading relative to my next goal? It becomes a curiosity. This is a strange thing amongst very good sailors. They often come up with little hypothesis about sail settings, or sailing the best VMG to the mark. This is what is was like on the best performing boat I ever sailed on. They didnt even switch their instruments on and would even forget their compass covers to just get out there and get things moving and check what the settings were and if anything would then make the boat go faster, or where we could put the boat to get an advantage. There is a really cool if VHS quality video on youtube by North Sails, sailing a j35 once the boat to have! This shows how even really, really good sailors are asking basic questions and experimenting a little to get more speed etc. Why do even very experienced sailors ask these ? Well wind and sea varies a lot, and boats vary over time too. Air humidity, water salinity, sheer in the wind and many things can really surprisingly affect your sailing and require minor adjustments for. This kind of playful curiousity is a recurring theme on good boats and I guess part of the fun of sailing! Back to a point i often make - get your head out of the boat! My mantra is this " If you know where the wind is coming from right now, and can set your sails and boat up accordingly, then you can sail competently. If you know where the wind is going to come from, you can master sailing"