Catamaran Masterclass TACKING 101

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Good morning guys. Today we are in the beautiful Exumas. It is an incredible morning here I can't wait to go sailing.
Let's talk about tacking. To get ready for our tack, we want to go ahead and bring our catamaran up to about 50 degrees to the wind. Most catamarans can point fairly well 50 degrees. Some of the newer bigger production catamarans you might have to tack from 60 degrees.
Once you're on your close haul of about 50 degrees. You want to go ahead and center your boom. Bring your traveler in so that that boom is right down the middle of the boat. Assign a couple people to be on the jib sheets. One person to be on your lazy jib sheet. One person to be on your loaded jib sheet.
The helmsmen is going to want to go ahead and figure out where the boat is going to end up when we complete the tack. So we can look 50 degrees into the wind and 50 degrees downwind. What reference point 100 degrees away is where we're going to end up.
Go ahead and get your jib sheets ready. You want to get your lazy sheet loaded up on that winch ready to go and you want to get the loaded sheet ready to release. Ideally, if there's enough space at the helm, you can have one person on the loaded sheet and one on the lazy sheet. Some catamaran helms are a little more crowded and you may have one person handling both of those lines.
There are a couple of key differences between tacking a monohull and a catamaran on a catamaran we really want to make sure we have enough speed to go through the turn. And when we do our tack, it's not going to be a sudden of a turn, as it is on the monohull attack on a catamaran is more of an arcing turn where we maintain and keep up our speed.
You really want to make sure that your catamaran is powered up to make it through the attack. So one trick is to actually fall off five or 10 degrees so that you get the speed you need to complete your attack.
One mistake that we see fairly frequently is as people are getting ready to attack catamaran they'll slowly start heading hubs with closer to 40 degrees. That de-powers the catamaran and often you'll run out of steam partway through your tack.
When we're ready to tack, the helmsmen is going to check with the crew to make sure everybody's ready. They're going to ask the question, "Ready to tack?" The crew respond when they're ready. Ready!
The helmsmen can then begin to tack and say, "Tacking!" Or if you're an old crusty salt, you can say, "helms a-lee!"
As we come through the wind on our tack, it's really important that we backwind the jib the main sail on a catamaran is so big that when we tack we can often experience what's called Wind vaning. Wind vaning is when the main sail pulls the boat back into the wind. To counter the influence of wind vaning, we need to back wind our jib. Hold that jib until it gets all the way down to at least 30 degrees before you release it.
Once the boat is through 30 degrees to the wind, you can go ahead and release that jib, and the person on the new loaded jib sheet can start cranking in once the person on the jib releases the helmsman is actually going to want to keep steering down to almost 60 degrees before they start straightening out. This is really important. If the helmsmen start straightening out at about 30 to 40 degrees. Often wind vaning will pull you right back up into irons.
When the helmsman has that course locked in at 60 degrees to the wind, the person on the jib can keep on trimming, trimming that jib tight, and now you'll have the speed to slowly head back up to a close hauled. Tacking really is a lot of fun when all the crew is working together to complete a tack and you pull one off that just seems to flow. It's a great feeling. So head out there practicing tacks with your crew and see if you can get those tacks down super, super smooth. You're tacking like a pro.
0:00 Intro
0:22 Getting ready
0:42 Get Close Hauled
1:30 Differences between monohulls and catamarans
1:50 Power Up!
2:18 Ready to tack?
2:30 Tacking!
3:19 power up bear away
4:00 Practice

[@bigman-adv]

Excellent

[@ronseits6823]

Very clear! Thank you.

[@NautilusSailing]

Glad it was helpful! There's more over on our online learn to sail masterclass.. Our goal was to boil things down to their simplest concepts, no need for long winded stories and such.

[@johnti8603]

Very Kool