Sailing in light airs
Making slow progress on the water on a calm summer day? Ben Meakins issues some helpful hints to improve performance
When (or should that be if?) the summer finally arrives, summer cruises are often characterised by spells of high pressure and light winds. That’s great news for powerboats, and the seas are certainly usually flat – but frustrating for sailors. If we wanted to motor everywhere, we’d have bought a motorboat!
You can make better progress than you think, however, with a few simple tweaks to sails, crew positioning and helming, which will make your passages much more interesting, keep the engine hours lower and teach you a thing or two about handling your boat.
Boat preparation
A clean bottom will do more for your light airs performance than almost anything else. A quick swim with a scourer or sponge, or a wipe with a hull brush, is better than nothing. Removing as much marine growth as possible is good for passage-making and fuel economy, too – but your best bet is to dry the boat out for a scrub before your summer cruise if you can.
The basics
The important thing to understand is that cruising boats are generally under-canvassed in light airs, and take an age to get moving. That means you need to do everything you can to get the momentum up by setting the sails with plenty of twist, sailing slightly further off the wind than you might do normally, and keeping rudder movements to a minimum.
Here’s how to do it.