Tony Bull looks at the fine-tune controls used to fly a symmetrical spinnaker off a pole, first published on Australian Sailing. When a complete novice first steps on board a racing yacht, invariably the first response is amazement at the number of sheets and lines that run along the deck and up the mast. They find it hard to comprehend that all these ropes have a role in the sailing of the boat. All top sailors will tell you the difference in the relative speeds of similar craft is the ability to constantly adjust the setup of the boat to [...]

Another interesting post from the Australian sailing site, mysailing.com.au. Figuring out how high to heat up your downwind angle is confusing. It feels better to get the boat moving, but after watching DORADO point right at the mark and get there first, and reading that if you’re having fun downwind you’re probably going too high, one starts to get the idea that finding the right angle might be more complicated. Here, Dave Flynn of Quantum Sails explains how the fastest downwind angle changes as pressure increases. It can be useful to divide sailing downwind into three modes: under [...]

We've been working on our spinnaker takedowns this year and made some good progress. We've become pretty comfortable with the floater, the stretch-and-blow, and our favorite this spring, the windward. Timing has been another issue, a couple of time we got a little greedy and waited too long resulting in sailing well past the Tower. This video shows two other techniques which we haven't done yet - the stretch-and-shred and the broach-and-blow.