If you work your way down wind to see how low you can point going down wind, just keep
rounding off until your jib starts to collapse. See how it's starting to fold upon itself.
It's starting to collapse and when it does that, then head back towards to the wind.
Is there a tactical name for that? "Heading up' right now. Heading up, ok. Just come up
enough until your jib fills back up again. Straighten your course out again and then
that's about as close haul, close reach as you can. I mean, excuse me, broad reach. We'll
do a second take. That was good stuff, by the way. I feel like there's really a good
chunk of knowledge there. It's the same way going up wind. Crew prepare to head up. Ready,
ready. Now we're going to head up toward the wind. As we do we're going to start trimming
in our sails. We're going to bring them in closer to center. As we start coming up, we're
going to be coming up on a close reach. Steve, what are you doing right now? I'm pulling
in, if you look at the main sail, see, in the front, see how it's fluttering and it's
not full. It's total luffing, and as I pull in the main you will notice you get that nice
curved shape sail on the sail again. Now the front of the sail is no longer fluttering,
or luffing. That's where you want, eventually you want to get all that fluttering out of
there. That gives you your proper sail track. Again, just as we did going down wind, now
we are headed up wind. We're going to test our sail. See how high we can point into the
wind. What you do that, just keep heading towards the wind. The wind is coming from
this direction. We'll keep an eye on our jib sail. The luff of the sail will start to collapse
on us again and when it does collapse, we'll just fall back off. See, It's starting to
fold up on us now. That's as high as we can point. If we point any further into the wind,
the wind will not have any effect on our sails like right now. See how they're luffing. What
we're going to do now is fall back off. We're going to bear away from the wind until our
sails fill up and then we'll set our course. Ok. There we go, our sails are full again.
What you are looking for is you want the tell-tails on the inside and the outside to be flying
horizontal. That means you're getting the split of the wind correctly over both sides.
Right now we're pretty close in a light wind. We have the back two tell-tales flying horizontal
and also the green ones on the outside. Well show you which. Easy rule of thumb is which
ever tell-tale is fluttering, you need to move the sail in that direction. For example,
I'm going to let the jib sail out. I'm letting it out to a point. Did you notice, now the
tell-tales are fluttering back and forth. That means we need to trim in or tighten the
sail. We will use the winch and we'll bring the jib in until we can get those tell-tales
flying horizontal again. In this light wind, that may be what we can get. A little bit
more, we'll it out and see if we can get them flying a little bit better. They're getting
a little bit more horizontal.. That looks pretty good. A rule of thumb, just to make
sure the tell-tales are horizontal instead of fluttering. Yes and then you always trim
the sail in the direction of which tell-tale is fluttering. So if you see the red ones
in this case, if the red ones are fluttering you'd tighten the sail, trim it in. If the
green ones on the outside are fluttering you would let the sail out. Use those as trim.
There's multiple sets depending on the boat that you're on. This boat has multiple sets
of tell-tales. You would kind of take the average of the lower and the upper and the
tops set of tell-tales. For your trim. We have two sets. Actually there's one up, way
up on the top. Oh, got it. It's usually the biggest trim problem is that people have the
sails too tight. There's an old saying says "when in doubt let it out". It's always ease
the sails and that's usually gets you more momentum. What do you mean to have the trim
too tight? People just have a tendency just cranking these sails in real, real tight and
that doesn't give you the optimum shape of the sail that you need to create that high
and low pressure. What we tell everyone to do is error on the side on the side of being
a little bit, a little less conservative with that sail and let it out and get some more
shape to that sail.