How to Sail: Sloan Warner

Explaining this without visuals may be much harder than I anticipate, but I am going to try it anyways. There are more pieces to a sailboat than the average person may imagine, but I am going to just explain the basic parts integral to sailing. First of all, you have your rudder which is how you steer the boat. The rudder is in the back of the boat and you steer with the tiller which is a stick attached to the rudder. If we were comparing a car to a sailboat, the wheels are the rudder and the steering wheel is the tiller. Now steering a sailboat is a little counter intuitive. If you want to go to the left, you push the tiller to the right and if you want to go right, you push the tiller to the left. You get used to this the more and more practice you have. In order to steer the boat, the boat has to be moving. This is a little more difficult. You can maneuver the sail by pulling in the main sheet (a rope) or letting out the main sheet. The general idea is to get the sail perpendicular to the direction of the wind. There are some instances when getting the sail perpendicular to the wind is impossible, which is when you are sailing upwind (into the direction the wind is coming from) in which case you just pull the sail in as much as you can. This is why sail races are difficult because when you are sailing upwind, you must maximize your speed but take a good angle so you don't have to turn back and forth hundreds of times. If you sail directly into the wind, the boat doesn't move. I hope you learned a little bit about sailing, and if you didn't, you can always just youtube a video that explains this 100 times better than I can.