Sailing Skills Changing Gear

Mark Rushall continues his look at how to get there quickly. How to change gear upwind, for racers and cruisers

- Mark Rushall

Whether you are racing a bunch of dinghies or keelboats to the next mark or aiming to beat the sun to the yardarm at the best anchorage in the bay, “changing gear” can be a key item in the sailing toolbox for “getting there quickly”.

In this feature I’ll again use the example of two boats from the Rushall fleet: the light and agile RS200, and the somewhat heavier and mature Honeybee, Ragdoll: a 4.5-ton long keelboat built in the 1960s. The principles we’ll discuss apply to the full range of sailing craft, but every boat and rig has its own specifics: if you are serious about the practise of “getting there quickly” I’d encourage you to play with the controls and adjustments available on your boat to get a feel for their effect on power, trim, and balance. For the purpose of the feature, I’ll describe the gear-changing process for these boats and allow you to extrapolate or interpolate for boats of varying complexity.

What do we mean by “changing gear”?

We are talking sailing techniques, not dress etiquette here. Wind and sea state continually change in strength, direction, and characteristics. A part of gear changing is steering, trimming sails and adjusting crew position to make the most of the changing opportunities.

The other part of gear changing is choosing to sail in a different mode to the one that either takes you in a straight line to the destination or when beating or running, at a different wind angle to the theoretically optimum one for the conditions.

Gear changing upwind