Higher Performance Sailing: Faster Handling Techniques by Frank Bethwaite

Author:Frank Bethwaite [Bethwaite, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472901309
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

15.8 ■ Eighteen footer racing tack

When I first started sailing Eighteens, the skipper used to go into the boat first and sit with his hand on the tiller ready to tack. By the end of the AAMI year 2, the skipper was the last person to go in. The actual process of a tack is that you have to sort things so that everybody knows that you are about to tack. Initially we used to do it counting down from five or three. Quite often on our boat, Andrew or David would call the tack. As skipper of an Eighteen in those days, you were just driving the boat as fast as you possibly could, and other than a call such as ‘Julian, you had better look at this’, I would not look beyond the bow, the next wave and the sails, so usually it would be the crew who would be calling the tack.

Once the call ‘We’ve got to tack’ was made, we would go into countdown procedure and put the boat through a tack. For a quick tack, the countdown was from two and there would be no pre-tack acceleration. Normally David would say ‘Ten seconds to tack’ and start counting.

At –5

The jib sheet would go out 1½in at the clew, and the mainsheet would be eased a similar amount. I would bear away about 2–3°, and the boat speed would increase.

At –1

The second change was to reduce the braking force of the deflected rudder as much as possible. So at countdown ‘one’, the forward hand stood up, and at ‘Go’ he started running across the boat. His mass accelerating across the boat forward of the slightly deflected rudder turned the bow into the wind. As he reached the other side, he grasped the trapeze handle and turned facing aft. His ‘facing aft’ body turn added further torque to the ‘into wind’ turn of the boat.

At ‘Go’

At ‘Go’ – that is, one second later – the sheet hand stood up and started running a shade behind the forward hand. He similarly turned facing aft as he grasped his trapeze and hooked up.

The dynamic effect of the two bodies accelerating across the boat well forward was that the boat swung into the tack quickly and needed little rudder angle, so there was little rudder drag.

I stayed on trapeze, moved the tiller away slowly at first, but then firmly, and steered to keep the boat level as it turned. The rate of turn was always the same.

At about 3

As the boat reached head to wind, by which time the forward hand was already moving out on trapeze on his new side and the rudder was at full deflection, I stood up, dropped the tiller extension, and ran.

At about 4

As the boat neared its new aiming point, the mainsail would begin to fill in the circular air flow. The sheet hand and the forward hand would together ‘ooch’ the windward wing down to drive the masthead to windward and the sheet hand would simultaneously give a mighty pump on the mainsheet.

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