Boating and Sailing.pdf - Moja ladja

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Part 7: Sailing, Sailing …
3. Tension it off with the ropes along the edge.
4. Hang on—you’re sailing!
To say the least, this may be a little oversimplified, but these are the steps that everyone
from former America’s Cup champion Dennis Connor on down go through when they
use the wind as their engine. (Except when Dennis was defending the America’s Cup in
1988 with a catamaran that had no cloth sails at all—only a large vertical rigid wing.)
Boat Bytes
If you want to look like you
know what you’re doing,
don’t ever call a mast a
“pole,” a sail a “sheet,” or
a halyard or a sheet a
“rope.” It makes expert sailors
testy.
From A to Z: Parts of a Sailboat
Learning sailing is like learning German, not so tough
if you’re in-country with people who speak it, and,
when they hand you a cup of coffee, tell you it’s eine
Tasse Kaffee. Sailing is like that. It’s easier to learn by
doing than by reading about it.
Go do it first, with a patient instructor, and then learn
the terms. You can learn to get around the buoy and
back in an hour. Doing it in style or with any hint of
speed can take months and years of study and practice.
However you learn to sail, though, there are a considerable number of terms that you will
eventually want to know, and the sooner you know them, the easier learning will be.
Check the figure that appears after this list for an idea of what is located where.
Let’s define these parts of a sailboat one by one:
1. Mainsail. The large sail on the back side of the main mast.
2. Jib. The sail set on the front side of the main mast and supported by the head stay
or forestay.
3. Mast. The vertically mounted pole used to support the sails and rigging.
4. Boom. The horizontal pole along the foot of a sail.
5. Main sheet. The line used to control the angle of the mainsail via the boom.
6. Jib sheet. The lines used to control the angle of the jib. Most boats have two jib
sheets, used one at a time depending on which side of the boat the wind is coming
from.
7. Halyards. Lines used to hoist sails up the mast or stay.
8. Luff. The front edge of a sail. (When a sail is “luffing,” it is flapping and loose, not
creating lift.)