The Cosine

Haven't had a ton of time to post lately but here's a quick thing you should all know: the cosine.

The cosine curve looks like this:

And it rules your life in sailing, whether you know it or not.

How fast you are getting to someplace (whether that place is a mark or the wind) is a function of your speed and how directly you are pointed at your destination. Your speed multiplied by the cosine of the angle between your heading and the destination is how fast you are getting to the destination.

For example, let's say we are going 10 knots (we're sailing Marstroms today) and we are tacking through 90* (Marstroms can't point very high). That means that our true wind angle (the angle between our heading and the wind's direction) is 45*. The cosine of 45* is .707. That makes our VMG (which is our speed of progress into the wind) 7.07 knots. If we get a 10* wind shift, our VMG is still 7.07 knots.

If the mark is directly upwind, then the speed at which we are heading to the mark is the same as our VMG - 7.07 knots. But if we get a 10* header, then the angle between our heading and the mark becomes 55*, and the cosine of 55* is .573. That reduces our speed to the mark down to .573. Ain't that a kick in the pants? On the other hand, if we get a 10* lift, the angle between our heading and the mark is 35*, and the cosine of 35* is .819. So our closing speed with the mark gets bumped up to 8.19 knots.

This is why I am such a freak about pointing to the mark. You have to have a REALLY good reason to not sail towards your next mark. This is a point on which I will continue to relentlessly hound you.

That is all.

Spinnaker trim

Before I get into a couple of other topics later this week, a few thoughts about spinnaker trim prior to BBR.

Spinnaker trim is a thing that's often mystifying to people for a long time, and then they kind of get it. With more boats moving to asymmetrical sails, it's becoming a dying art. One of my favorite roles on big boats used to be trimming the guy, it was something I did well enough to get asked onto good boats to do. Now the big boats I'd like to sail don't have a guy to trim. C'est la vie.

When you are reaching, there are a few things about spinnaker trim. You need to keep the pole LOWER than you would running, as this gets the leech of the sail to twist open. If you have the pole too high, the leech will close. If the leech closes, the jib will interfere with the spinnaker leech and if you ease the main, the main could even hit the spinnaker. If it's light air and these things happen, the spinnaker will collapse. If it's heavy air and these things happen, you'll probably flip over.

If your spinnaker luffs, you need to trim the sheet, let the pole forward, head down, or some combination of all three. When your spinnaker is luffing, it is a lively flapping.

If your spinnaker collapses, you need to square the pole (try that first), ease the sheet, head up, or some combination of all three. When your spinnaker collapses, it is not a lively flapping.

The difference between luffing and collapsing is that a luffing sail is flapping all around and acting like an excited puppy. When it collapses, it just droops and hangs there, like a very very very old dog.

This 470 isn't actually close reaching. If they were close reaching in this much breeze, the skipper would be hiking hard on the windward side. But it's the closest pic I could find for what I want to show. The jib is very much under trimmed. Your jib must not ever be over trimmed downwind. It is deadly. The vang is eased enough that the main sheet doesn't have to be eased very far to depower the main. This keeps the main far away from the spinnaker leech. And the pole is low, opening the spinnaker's leech and keeping it away from the main, and promoting good flow across the spinnaker. 

This is a 505 close reaching in medium conditions (505s are much more powerful than 470s). Notice that the pole is at a low angle, and the jib is eased. Notice also that the main is trimmed quite hard. The worst mistake you can make reaching is to have the spinnaker over trimmed and the main ender trimmed. Over trimming the jib would simply be another terrible thing to add to that. Notice also that the pole is just a tiny bit off of the forestay. If you let the pole hit the forestay, the pole will bend around the forestay. This effectively shortens the pole's extension (because the pole is bent) and it allows the spinnaker to rotate too far to leeward. The leech hooks back to windward, pointing right at the main when you do this. Very very slow. This boat shows how you want to look. Coincidentally, this boat is the world champion.

This picture (go Stu and Dave!) shows good heavy air running technique. Look at how high the pole is! The pole acts a lot like the cunningham. It moves the draft forward toward the luff (the guy side) and opens the leech. Simple. When you run, you want the draft away from the luff, and you want a relatively closed leech. If it was lighter, they could pull the pole back more, but it's obviously almost scary windy here so they keep the pole a little farther forward for stability and to make it easier to steer the boat in the waves. Jib is very eased. 

This picture shows light air running. I believe that they could pull the pole back (or "square the pole" as we actually call it) both to get more spinnaker projection, and to get the spinnaker leech away from the main. But who knows because it's one picture taken at a moment in time. In very light air, you can't run with the spinnaker all the way squared - it's like sailing a school 420 when it's too light to go wing-and-wing. But it looks like there is enough breeze here to wing, which means there is enough breeze to go full square. When you go full square, your limit is that you want to keep the clew to leeward of the forestay. This sail shape actually doesn't look very good to me. I'd like pole more squared and maybe a bit higher.

Again, this isn't meant to be a full encyclopedia of spinnaker trim but just a few general ideas on it, with some pictures to show how it looks when it's done right and maybe not so right.

Training, as simply as I can explain it

Most of you do other sports throughout the year. No matter where you go in sailing, or in any other sport, I recommend doing some complementary other sport. Your sailing can be helped by a lot of physical skills that sailing does little or nothing to develop. Not only do these other athletic traits help make you a better sailor, they make you a better human animal. If you want to really understand where I'm going with that thought, read "The Warrior Athlete" by Dan Millman. It's an excellent book.

In any case, I was pretty dumb about training until I started racing bikes seriously about 10 years ago. I sometimes trained a lot, sometimes got very fit, sometimes wasn't very fit, sometimes could hike harder than everybody, sometimes couldn't hike harder than anybody. Long story short, I got a little sick of sailing (25 years of being absolutely obsessed with it will do that to a person) and decided to explore bike racing a bit. In sailing, if you aren't fit, the game is harder than it could be. In cycling, if you're not fit, you're going to get last. Cycling is a high speed poker game where the ante is a relatively extraordinary level of fitness, and those of you who know me well won't be surprised to learn that I dove in an learned a whole lot about training - because I really don't like getting last.

You don't get stronger when you train, you get stronger when you rest. Resting all the time turns you into a fat sloth, though. The key is to train enough to initiate a training response, and then rest enough to allow that training response to happen. If you go hard every day, you will soon break yourself down. If you go hard for a couple of days and then take an easy day, you get stronger.

Monotonous training makes you plateau quickly. If you are trying to run a marathon and only go out and do long runs at moderate pace, you will make big gains for a while, and then soon enough all improvements will stop. You need to train long duration moderate pace sometimes, and short duration high intensity at other times. You need strength in order to prevent breaking yourself during run training. Doing one thing all the time breaks you down and makes you stale. Training different elements at varying intensities will make you faster, stronger, and fitter.

Sailing isn't usually enough training for sailing. If you go through a long block of a lot of sailing without doing any other training, you will get weaker and lose endurance, and develop small injuries.

Nutrition is really important to athletic performance. You're young and so you get away with it for now, but if you eat like crap and most of you do, you could be doing better than you are now, and soon enough crappy eating will catch up with you. Drink more water, eat less sugar, eat more vegetables.

Sleep is really important to athletic performance. People's sleep needs vary, and it's hard to get enough sleep when you have as many demands as a lot of you do, but try. If you're constantly fatigued, you need more sleep. You need to learn to recognize when you are not getting enough sleep, and make sleep a priority.

As promised, this is as simple as I can make it. These are the very biggest points, stripped down as much as they can be per my perspective. It's very easy to learn WAY WAY more than what I've talked about here, but if you take it no further than this, you now know much more than most people do about training.

Marking your settings

Yesterday, Ellie asked about jib trim markings and how to use them. Here are some thoughts about markings in general. Remember that anything I write is generally going to be aimed at getting you to think more. I'm not the type to give the exact answer and that's the way it is, do it or I'll be mad. I'd much rather show you how good sailors tend to think about those things, and help you generate your own ability to think about things in a similar way for yourself. I'm much more "teach a man to fish" than "give a man a fish." And by "man," I of course mean gender non-specific person as always.

We mark things for a few different reasons. One is to be able to replicate settings - they give us a reasonably exact breadcrumb trail to be able to get back to settings we found to be fast. They also allow us to gauge how much we are moving stuff - going "one stripe more" on jib halyard tension is much more exact than "adding a little halyard tension."

Some marks are what I'll call hard references. On the M32, we mark the daggerboards at the point two which we raise the windward board. We're not trying to learn about the shape of the daggerboard at that point or anything, we just want to know when it's up as much as we want it to be, so we mark that point and that's how high it gets raised. You should mark your centerboard so you know how high it is.

Other parts are settings references. Where you put your shroud pins is a good example of this. Also, where your jib halyard block is on the mast is another. The combination of those two will tell you your rake and tension settings, because if your shroud pins are at position "X" and your halyard is at position "3," there is a rake and tension combination that they will make.

This picture shows how you would mark your jib halyard. Make a set of marks like the pink ones, that cover the range of where your halyard block would be in different conditions. You need to know where your reference point is on the halyard block, and use the same reference point all the time.

Then there are trim references. Trim references are sort of kind of like training wheels. They are good to use, but eventually what you want to be able to do is look at the sail and be able to adjust it to make it look how you want it to look. I'm not saying that these trim references are wrong at all, and they are efficient to use even for very advanced sailors - for example I might know that if my jib lead is at position "C," I have to be careful about how tight I trim the jib in order to prevent stalling. Even if I can't see the jib leech to know when it's stalling, I can look at other clues to help me know where I am with the trim - how curled the foot is, how many stress wrinkles the clew has, etc. 

Here are some of the types of trim references you can use:

Having clew stripes like this allows you to know the trim axis of your jib sheet. If the jib sheet is lining up with the orange/yellow line, we know that we are trimming the foot quite hard and the leech not so much. If the sheet lines up with the red line, then we are trimming the leech very hard and the foot will be round. The main trim line should point to a spot on the jib luff that is slightly less than halfway up the luff from the tack. On a boat that doesn't have adjustable jib leads, your rake setting will be the only adjustment you can make to this. 

Stripes like this orange ones on the splash rail or deck allow you to see how far inboard your sheeting is. Windward sheeting, leeward sheeting, and rake/rig tension (to a smaller degree) will affect how your jib lines up with this set of marks. Windward sheeting has the biggest effect. Notice proper use of "affect" and "effect" in this caption. 

Marks like these on your spreaders will tell you the inboard/outboard position of your jib leech. The clew stripes (which are most affected by rake and rig tension, remember) and leeward and windward sheet tension will affect how your jib leech lines up with these stripes. If we had our jib sheet lined up with the yellow/orange clew stripe in the picture above, the jib leech would line up with a far outboard spreader stripe like the yellow one pictured here. If we lined up the jib sheet with the red clew stripe, the jib leech would move inboard, to the blue line maybe. Having your jib leech further inboard can help your pointing, but it makes the boat harder to sail (especially in chop) and can hurt boat speed. Fast sailing is all about balancing different things. 

Marking the vang is helpful. Mark it like this, in the purchase system, instead of on the tail. On I420s and Z420s, you have two tails and they move around relative to one another, so marking the tails is useless. 

The last picture I'll put up today is this one. You could use a sticker like this for your jib halyard markings, and you can also use it for your outhaul. Marking the outhaul is good. 

The point of using all these marks isn't to become robots and set things to specified marks and away we go. Instead, they help us quantify different settings. "Outhaul at position 4" is more exact than saying "medium outhaul." If you were really really overpowered and you had your shroud pins at position 3, so try moving them down to position 5 next time and see if that works better. If position 5 gives you great speed but your pointing is bad, then you can try position 4. Just remember that your jib halyard and shroud pin positions are always interconnected - you can't think of one without referencing the other. 

Unless you have your marks exactly calibrated to another boat's marks, they are only really useful when sailing your boat - to talk about your jib leech lining up with your third spreader mark is useless if the other boat's third spreader mark isn't precisely where yours is.  About the best you can do in that situation is if the other boat is going better and you all think that their jib leech is positioned more inboard than yours, you might try to set your jib so that the leech lines up one mark farther in on your spreader. If you are going to tune with another boat a lot, it is worth calibrating all of your marks to be exactly precisely the same. That allows you to move one variable at a time, to an amount and to a position that both boats know, and if it works for one boat then the other one can replicate it quickly and try it. 

The rest of goal setting

Last time we talked about specificity of goals, which is the "S" in the SMART goal setting principle, and we also went through strengths and weaknesses versus limiters, neutrals, and enablers. Right into the rest...

Measurable: This is one of the hardest things to achieve with sailing goals, simply because sailing is so relative. By that I mean if you beat other people, you take that as a positive sign, and if you lose to other people that's a negative. The problem is what if the other guy has the flu or is tired from a brutal workout week or is just off? Or if the other guy (and by guy of course I mean gender non-specific other person, as ever) is just peaking and smashing it? Cycling, running, swimming - these are all super easy to measure. I want my 10k time to get to x, I want my threshold watts/kg to be x, I want my 200 free time to be x - these are measurable in the absolute, totally non-dependent on other people.

Although still relative, there are a few ways you can kind of measure things in the absolute. Keeping tabs on when you are "plus boats" or "minus boats" is a great one. If you have been struggling upwind but caning it downwind, a good goal would be to improve the upwind. Is it speed or positioning or shift strategy that's hurting you? Evaluate each element, and work on the ones that need most help. Then play a game to have the best first top mark position you can, do what you do on the run, and then gain boats (or at least not lose them, also because hey maybe you're in the lead and no one to pass) on the second beat. A leg when you are "plus boats" is any leg when you've passed more people than have passed you. A "minus boats" leg is the opposite. This works well because you are judging yourself versus an aggregate of boats, which should smooth out any spikes from individuals who are on particularly good or bad days.

Improving lineups against known partners is also a good way to measure. Be as open and honest with each other as you can be about how you are feeling, the level of sails you're using that day - everything. Taking out a freshie sail and beating up on people using bed sheets tells you nothing.

Achievable: Pretty straightforward here. If you are currently struggling to win in your local events, making the Worlds Team this year is going to be a big stretch. Becoming a more consistent and relevant player in your local events is more realistically achievable. On the other hand, some of you will be realistically trying to win a nationals. Your goals should stretch you, but they shouldn't be so far out that they're hard to take seriously, or will just depress you because they're unrealistic given where you're starting from. Challenge yourself but give yourself a chance. The pleasure of meeting an appropriately challenging goal is big.

Relevant: This really has a lot to do with limiters, neutrals, and enablers. If something isn't a limiter, improving it needn't be a goal. On the other hand, if a weakness IS a limiter, then improvement in that venue is a relevant goal.

Trackable: Intermediate steps help guide you on the path to the greater goal. If you want to improve hiking fitness, then the amount of time you can hold a wall sit is a good milepost for that. You should see incremental gains in your ability to do each of your exercises. If you are seeing backwards progress, then that is time to evaluate. Are you overtired and pounding yourself into the ground? Are you staying out too late at night and not getting good sleep? How is your nutrition going? Your world should be full of little touchstones to help keep you aware of your progress towards your goal. Pay attention to them.

A last point about goal setting is that until you write them down, commit to them, and share them with other people, they aren't real. Opening your notebook and seeing your goal in print makes you accountable to it. Having your parents ask you how you are progressing toward a goal you've shared with them makes you accountable to it.

Soon enough I will talk about my goals for the 2016-2017 SG team. I am still working on them, which isn't easy given the number of variables involved, but I have a good handle on the rough outline.

Goal Setting

If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.

I've always found the toughest part about goal setting to be just doing it. Setting a goal means committing to trying to achieve a specific outcome, and sometimes just knowing what you want to do is the hardest thing. It means prioritizing, which means you have to sacrifice in some areas in order to increase what you're doing in others. There are so many hours in the day, so many places your parents can drive you, so many hours your coaches are available, and of course then there are the things that are always more important than sailing - school, family, and whatever else you have committed to.

A very popular mnemonic (look it up) for goal setting is SMART. S means specific, M means measurable, A means achievable, R means relevant or rewarding, and T means trackable. Not every goal is going to fit into this framework, but most well-constructed ones will.

I've got to keep it short today (my goal was to get a good post out after being overwhelmed with regular work and some important family stuff), so we'll break this up into a couple.

S. Specific. "I'd like to get better at sailing" or "I'd like to have better results this year" are popular goals that I hear all the time. And wouldn't we all like to do both of them? The problem is that they don't really mean anything - they don't give any framework for what you should do to get started achieving them.

In bike racing, we talk a lot about limiters. You have strengths and weaknesses in one set, and limiters, neutrals, and enablers in another. You might stink at climbing, but if you live in an area where all the races are flat, your weakness at climbing isn't a limiter. It doesn't prevent you from winning races. On the other hand, if you stink at sprinting and live in an area where there are a lot of flat races, you're going to need to get better at sprinting. Now. So in that case, a weakness is indeed a limiter.

For specificity, I like to have people examine all of their strengths and weaknesses and decide which are limiters, neutrals, and enablers. Every race has a start, so if you are struggling with starts, that is going to be a limiter. You need to work on starts. So that becomes a primary goal if you want to "get better results." Successful starts have a bunch of different components - determining first beat strategy, picking the favored end, getting and USING good line sights, good boat handling, time-to-line management, good acceleration, the ability to have either a high mode or a fast mode immediately after the start, and probably a couple of others I've left out.

If you don't have a lot of physical strength and you are a Laser sailor, guess what? On the other hand, if you're skippering an I420, not only do you basically need just enough strength to pull the mainsheet in, excess strength is going to mean excess weight, so one person's enabler could be another person's limiter. It all depends on what you're after.

So today's homework is to first determine how much priority you can give to sailing. If you are trying to become a Juilliard-level musician, you can become a very good sailor but the goal of becoming College Sailor of the Year is probably unrealistic (although not technically impossible). On the other hand, if you'd like to go to an Ivy League or other top-tier school and also become College Sailor of the Year, that's a fairly well worn path. A very very challenging one, but it's a path.

And then the second part of your homework is to deconstruct what you're good and less good at, and categorize them into either limiters (things that prevent you from success), neutrals (things that neither contribute to or prevent success), and enablers (things that promote desired outcomes).

Modes

First off, I don't want to jinx it but the latest Bermuda Race sked has the High Noon still absolutely wrecking it. Super psyched for those guys, tremendous accomplishment for them.

So what do we mean when we talk about modes? Well, thanks to last week's discussion of VMG, we know that there is an optimal way to sail the boat to get into the magical source of the wind the fastest. But thanks to VMC, we know that there's also a fastest way to sail up the course, and it's not too big a step to realize that though VMC and VMG are sometimes aligned, it doesn't happen that often. What those two also leave out is that there are a lot of times when we want to position ourselves in a certain way relative to our competition, or to hammer down and get to a shift, or some other consideration. Different modes are just shorthand ways of talking about ways to accomplish these goals. Without further ado...

Off the start line, your lane and your strategic aims will determine what mode you're in. If you have a nice fat lane and you're in no particular hurry to tack, you'll want to just go into standard "upwind mode" or "VMG mode." This is just you sailing your boat optimally upwind for the conditions - just like you were out on your own were trying to sail as fast upwind as you could.

It might be that you're bow out on a group of boats to leeward of you and you want to trade some of your height advantage to go more bow forward on them. If you're in this situation, first of all congratulations on what must have been a really good start. But if the left side is favored, or if you are really lifted and expect it to shift back before long, consolidating down in front of boats to leeward would be a good move. In this case, you'd go into "foot mode." Depending on breeze conditions and available controls, there are a bunch of different things you can do. In a Z420 in moderate/both people hiking conditions, you could ease weather jib sheet, pull on a taste more vang, move body weight aft a little bit, hike REALLY hard and just fly the leeward jib telltales a tiny little bit. Your VMG maybe won't be as good as it would be in upwind mode, but you'd be sailing the course and your competition better.

On the other hand, maybe you're in a thin lane but for any of a million different reasons, you can't or don't want to tack. Chuck it into "point mode." Point mode can be tough because it's usually kind of a knife edge - it's working best just before it totally stops working completely. You can tighten sheeting angle (pull mainsheet a little harder, use a bit more windward sheeting), and you can also use a bit more leech tension (mainsheet works for this too, as we discussed - so don't pull it twice! - and maybe a little jib sheet also). Weight forward and a tiny bit of leeward heel, depending on conditions (modes are ALWAYS conditions dependent).

"Build mode" is an important one - when you need to build speed quickly, you're in build mode. The object of build mode is to gain boat speed as quickly as possible while sacrificing the minimal amount of height (or gauge). Accelerating out of a tack or other maneuver is probably the number one time you're in build mode. I find sheet trim (which we'll eventually start calling "big ropes") to be the main deal on build mode: you have to be trimmed enough, but overtrimming is a speed build killer. And the rate of trim has to match the rate of acceleration.

"Park" is also super important. There are a zillion times in a team race when you might need to park, and pre-start always offers some chance to show off your parking skills.

The big takeaway from this particular post is not to go into the minutia of how you execute any particular mode in any particular boat or conditions, simply because they vary too much along those variables. The important thing is to recognize that boats have these different modes, and the sailors and teams that really smash it are the ones who recognize when a particular mode is needed, and quickly communicate and begin executing the appropriate adjustments to move into that mode. Start by talking about it in the boat - "I think we need to be in foot mode here," for example. Practice different techniques and adjustments for executing the different modes. Don't be shy about making mistakes, and don't get hung up on them when you do. Simply learn and move on. Then, start integrating the recognition and execution pieces and you will have some nasty weapons to start using.

A Bunch of Definitions Part 1

A lot of these will come in handy for people at Brooke Gonzalez this weekend. I got booted off the wheel of the M32 last night because the traveler guy had an injury which would have made doing traveler not so fun for him. So I did traveler and was in charge of monitoring relative performance of the boats, and observing differences in our setups. I wished the whole time that we had a voice recording of the session as we were speed tuning against a boat that just-named College Sailor of the Year Nevin Snow was driving, with a bunch of match race world tour guys sailing with him. Almost everything we said was stuff that civilians wouldn't have understood but that every sailor needs to know.

If you are one of the people going to Bermuda, good luck have fun keep your eyes open and CLIP IN EVERY FRICKING INSTANT YOU ARE ON DECK. I DON'T CARE. NO VIKING FUNERALS, PLEASE!

If you are sailing 420s or 29ers, please start using these terms in the boat. Even if you are sailing Lasers, please use these terms in your head as the words you think will become the words you say. I once met a Laser sailor who insisted on calling the cunningham the "ooker" simply because that's what he had taken to calling it. It stands out to me 20 years after I heard it, because it was probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm not kidding. Also talking to your coaches (assuming you have good coaches, as you will at Gonzalez) becomes much easier when you use the right words correctly. 

It's possible that every other post for the next few weeks will just be definitions.

These are in random order.

VMG - Velocity Made Good. Imagine that there is some magical place that is the source of the wind you are sailing in. Imagine it is very far away. How fast you are getting to that magical place is your VMG. If you are going downwind, VMG is how fast you are getting away from that magical place. VMG has nothing to do with a mark or a finish line or Bermuda (Bermuda Race starts today), or anything other than that magical source of the wind place. The formula for determining your VMG is very easy. It is VMG = Cos(TWA) x Vs. "Vs" stands for "Velocity, ship" in sailing instrument-speak but you can call it "boat speed." Everyone else does. VMG relates to how well you are sailing the boat. A wind shift does not change your VMG.

VMC - Velocity Made good on Course. VMC, as opposed to VMG, has everything to do with how fast you are getting to the next mark, the finish line, Bermuda (Bermuda Race starts today), etc. When you are talking about your rate of progress to a hard, fixed destination, you are talking about VMC. In short course racing, it is almost never called "VMC" for a couple of reasons that are not important now. You will hear people saying things like "VMG to the mark" instead, and that is fine in every respect. The important thing is to differentiate - VMG used on its own means "progress into the wind" (or away from the wind if you are going downwind), and if you want to express your rate of progress to a point, you need to call it either VMC or "VMG to (whatever fixed point you're trying to get to)." VMC relates to how well you are sailing the course. A wind shift does change your VMC. 

TWA - True Wind Angle. The angle, in degrees, between your current course through the water and the wind's direction. If your heading is 300 and the true wind direction (TWD) is 345, your true wind angle is 45*. Bonus question 1: if your heading is 300 and the TWD is 345, which tack are you on? Bonus question 2: if your heading is 300 and the TWD is 345, what would you assume your heading on the other tack will be? Bonus question 3: if your heading is 300 and the TWD is 345 and you are going 7 knots, what is your VMG?

Gauge - Pronounced "gage" not "gowge." Two boats are sailing on the same tack, in close proximity to one another. If one is gaining windward distance relative to the other, that boat is "gaining gauge." If the leeward most boat is the one gaining gauge, they are said to be "closing gauge." If the windward boat is doing the gaining, you usually say they are "opening gauge." A boat that is gaining gauge is also frequently said to be "elevating" relative to the other. If you have better pointing, you will gain gauge and elevate. Gauge is basically interchangeable with "height." If you are gaining gauge, you are gaining height. There are times when it is more specific to use one than the other but you are far from needing to worry about those.

Track - Two boats are sailing on the same tack, in close proximity to one another. A boat that is going forward relative to the other is said to be gaining track. It's also simply referred to as going "bow forward." Tack is used interchangeable with speed, and also "bow forward." It's all about how and when you use them, but if you say "we're going bow forward on them" (for example) everyone on the boat will know what you're talking about. 

If the two boats in this picture are doing things right, they will just about be wearing out the words and phrases in today's definitions set. 

Net Gain or Loss- Net gain or loss is your comparative VMG relative to other boats on the same tack that are immediately around you. Imagine you are sailing against one other boat. If you are gaining gauge AND track, then you are definitely making a net gain. If you have really good pointing but your speed is not as good, if your pointing advantage is bigger than your speed disadvantage, then you are making a net gain. On the boat, you might say "gauge to us, track to them, net to us." That is a VERY efficient way of saying "we're point better than they are, but they are going a little faster than we are, and I think overall that our VMG is a little better." You could also say "height to us, speed to them, net to us" and everyone would understand you. It's all about efficient communication. The magic is in being able to decide what the net actually is. Very easy to do when there is land behind the other boat (as people who wen to FL this spring would have learned), quite not easy when you aren't looking at land behind the other boat. It's an ability that develops over time with LOTS of practice. 

Foils - Collective term for your boat's sails, rudder, and daggerboard/centerboard/keel. They are all foils. Often people mean "underwater foils" when they say "foils" - they mean to exclude the sails. Learn to deal with that one.

Blades - The underwater foils, referred to correctly. Many Laser sailors own "blade bags." Get it?

Flow - The appropriate fluid moving over a foil. For sails, the appropriate fluid is air. For blades, it is water. If you have air flow on your blades, things have gone or are about to go really quite badly. "Flow" is the opposite of "stall."

Stall - When the appropriate fluid is NOT moving over a foil. When you overtrim the main and the top batten telltale dies and points straight down, you have "stalled the main." Stall can happen from bad trim, or from pointing too high or from pointing too low. Very good sailors learn to feel flow and stall at all times, and can tell when the boat is gaining better flow or is about to stall. 

That's enough for today, I have to go build wheels. If you are at Brooke, pay attention, take notes, and use the right fricking words, okay? 

Sheeting angle versus leech tension

Starting off with a favorite. A quick housekeeping note before we get into it: any word with a * is a word I don't necessarily expect you to know right away. One of the next posts will be about the language of speed, which will have a bunch of these defined. Some of them are worth posts all on their own. And always feel free to comment or ask questions.

In a lot of boats, pulling on the sheet is responsible for pulling the sail both down and in. When you pull the sail down, you are first of all affecting the leech tension. When you pull the sail in, you are primarily affecting the sheeting angle. As you progress, more boats will offer you the opportunity to do one without the other. Being able to adjust the one without affecting the other opens up a lot of sail trim possibilities, but even when the two are connected (Lasers, school boats), being aware of what you're after can help a lot.

C420, I420, and 29er sailors get to disconnect the two on the mainsheet by using a bridle, and windward sheeting the jib lets us adjust the jib's sheeting angle without adding leech tension. 29er jib cars get pinned in different positions to adjust sheeting angle. You can't adjust them in real time like a lot of other boats let you do, but it's a good start. Vang sheeting in a Laser, where the vang is tight enough to keep the boom down even when you ease the sheet out, is another example of separating the leech tension and sheeting angle functions.

Some SG sailors will remember a very light day this spring when I told some skippers to sheet Z420 mains directly from the boom. This allowed them to pull the sail in without pulling it down. The picture below shows what I was after there.

This is a TP52 and I'll use them a lot to illustrate points, both because they have the full array of sail controls and because there are tons of easy to find pictures that work for what I want to show. You can clearly see that their boom is above centerline here. As you go up the main, at some point the leech is just on centerline, and then towards the top it is below centerline. There are a bunch of reasons why you'd want to do this, prime among them would be wind shear* which we'll discuss later.



My red arrow in this picture points to the in/out jib track, which you can see just below the clew. The jib sheeting angle is every bit as important (often more so) than the main's sheeting angle. Notice also the main traveler position here - not even close to as high as in the pic above. I'd bet the mainsheet is so tight in this pic that the mainsheet winch is begging for mercy.

A tight leech is great in a lot of conditions - flat water and medium breeze prime among them. With a tight leech, you get to go fast and point high, but there is a tight groove*. Too tight a leech and the sail will stall*, cratering both your speed and pointing. This is why so many of you heard me say "when in doubt, ease it out" this spring.

A looser, twisted leech allows the sail to easily "spill" wind. This is great in light air to prevent stall, and also in heavy air to prevent excess heel. It also gives the boat a wide steering groove, which lets you go fast and point okay but lets you steer around and through chop without slowing down.

A great thought exercise while you are sailing is to think about which adjustment you'd prefer to make in different situations. Sailing along in flat water, fully hiked, and get a huge puff? Easing leech tension allows you to spill some of that excess power (there is also a thing in there about why Roy and I disagree so much about the truth of "ease/hike/trim," which is a topic for another day). Want to move bow forward relative to another boat? Keep leech tension on, ease sheeting angle a bit, and motor down over them. Big set of chop that you need to get through - twist the sails by having slightly looser leeches but tight sheeting angle is your fastest way through that.

Most of the boats you'll sail for the next couple of years don't give you the range of control options that would be ideal, but you need to start thinking about leech tension versus sheeting angle all the time. It's really important.