Maybe you’ve heard the phrase “It’s not like driving a car. It’s like driving a boat.” If you sail a few times you will understand exactly what that means. You might even start using the phrase yourself after you see how perfectly the analogy applies to so many real life situations. The bottom line is that boats respond much more slowly than cars, and when they do respond, they can be very difficult to control at all.
Since most people are accustomed to driving cars, they may try to turn a boat and expect something to happen. But it doesn’t, at least not right away. So this initial delay leads to a tendency to overcorrect or turn too far. We will discuss more differences between boats and cars in the section on maneuvering under motor, but the moral of the story is this: make small adjustments when steering a boat – smaller than you think you need – at least when you’re a beginner.
Tillers and Wheels
Steerage of a sailboat is controlled by the rudder, which is mounted near the back of the boat. To put it another way, the rudder controls the back of the boat, which moves in the opposite direction of the front of the boat during a turn. So to turn the boat to starboard, the rudder is used to send the stern to port.
A tiller controls this rudder action directly – the tiller is simply a long lever attached to the top of the rudder – so to turn the boat starboard, you move the tiller to port. This action is often counterintuitive and takes some getting used to.
On the other hand, some boats have a wheel, which is connected to the rudder through a system of gears. The wheel is set up to turn the rudder in a manner that will guide the boat in the same direction that the wheel is turned. So when you turn a wheel to starboard, the gears turn the rudder to port (which you will most likely not even notice) and the boat turns to starboard.
To summarize, a wheel is designed to operate more intuitively like a car – you look where you want to go and turn the wheel that way – while tillers function in a somewhat counterintuitive manner – you move the tiller opposite to where you want to go.
Another way to look at it is that a tiller controls the direction of the stern while a wheel controls the direction of the bow. When moving backwards, it’s just the opposite – a tiller controls the bow direction and a wheel guides the stern direction. However, just as when going forward, you move the tiller opposite the direction you want to move and a wheel in the same direction that you’re aiming. The only difference is that you are now guiding the boat backwards.
Leeway
Earlier we discussed the fact that a portion of wind forces tend to push the boat sideways – technically abeam. Most of these forces are reacted by the hull, keel and rudder, but not all of them. So when you sail a boat perfectly straight along a certain tack, the side forces cause the boat to drift slightly downwind. Leeway refers to this sideways motion downwind.
It’s important to keep leeway in mind when projecting your movement ahead. If you ignore leeway when attempting to sail around an object – as I have done more times that I care to admit – you will end up either coming too close for comfort, having to tack at the last minute, or worse, hitting the object.
The amount of leeway is dependent on the strength of the side force – which depends on the tack – and the ability of the hull, rudder, and keel to react those side forces. For a smaller boat that doesn’t have a keel, it is important to use the centerboard to resist leeway, which is the main reason the centerboard is dropped further down as the boat approaches a close hauled tack (as seen earlier in Figure 9). In fact, the centerboard adds minimally to stability, but does a decent job reducing leeway.
Holding a course
When you’re sailing on an upwind tack, you’ll notice that the wind seems to pull the bow of the boat into the wind. Usually the mainsail of a boat is larger in area than the foresail, so more of the wind force act on the back of the boat, pushing the stern away from the wind and turning the bow into the wind. So to hold a tack you’ll need to keep turning slightly away from the wind.
Water waves, on the other hand, tend to act on the bow when you are sailing against them – and against the wind. So the waves tend to turn the boat away from the wind, at least on the front side of the wave. On the back side of the wave, gravity tends to make the boat fall back the other way. To hold a tack in heavy seas, you’ll need to turn the rudder back and forth turning into the wind – and waves – on the front side of each wave and quickly correcting back the other way on the downside of the wave.
