Orientation

Basic Cruising is where you learn to sail a small cruising sailboat as useful crew, and to take the helm with a skipper aboard. It is the foundation the rest of your sailing is built on. Once you know the boat, the wind, and the words the crew uses, the activity on deck starts to make sense.

This first section is entirely ashore. There is nothing to do here but read, try the simulators, and check your understanding. It gives you the vocabulary and the main ideas, so that when you step aboard, an instruction like "ease the mainsheet and bear away" is one you understand.

How each section works. You learn the idea from a short reading, you simulate it with a model you can play with, and you check it with a few quick questions. Tick off each learning point as you go. Your progress saves automatically.

By the end of this section you will know the parts of a sailboat, how a sail moves a boat (including how a boat sails toward the wind), the names for the wind angles and the steering, and how to move around a boat safely and help with the lines.

Every instruction on the water assumes you know the names of things. You cannot tail the halyard or ease the vang if the words mean nothing yet. None of this is difficult. It is just new, and learning it once pays off every day afterward.

The boat itself.

• Hull: the body of the boat that floats.
• Keel: the heavy fin under the hull. It keeps the boat from sliding sideways and helps keep it upright. It is central to how sailing works, and it has its own section below.
• Rudder: the blade at the back that you turn with the wheel or tiller to steer.
• Deck, cockpit and cabin: the deck is the surface you walk on, the cockpit is the sunken area where you sit and steer, and the cabin is the living space below.

Holding the sails up. The mast is the tall vertical spar. The boom is the horizontal spar along the bottom of the mainsail. Wires called standing rigging hold the mast up: stays run forward and aft, and shrouds run out to the sides.

Working the sails. The ropes you pull are the running rigging. Halyards raise the sails. Sheets pull them in and let them out. You take the load on these lines with winches (the metal drums you wind) and hold them with cleats or clutches. On a boat, a rope with a job has a proper name, and the crew uses it.

The sails. The mainsail sits behind the mast, on the boom. The headsail (often called the jib) sits in front of the mast. Each sail has three corners (the head at the top, the tack at the front bottom, the clew at the back bottom) and three edges (the luff at the front, the leech at the back, the foot along the bottom).

Open the 3D model below and turn the boat around until the names stick.

Sailors use fixed words for direction so an instruction is never ambiguous. These words are tied to the boat, not to which way you happen to be facing.

• Bow is the front, stern is the back, amidships is the middle.
• Port is the left side as you face forward, starboard is the right. Port has four letters and so does left, which is an easy way to remember it. Port is marked red, starboard green.
• Forward and aft mean toward the bow and toward the stern. Ahead and astern mean in front of and behind the boat. Abeam means straight out to the side.

Two more words matter as soon as the sails go up:

• Windward: the side the wind reaches first, the upwind side.
• Leeward (say "loo-ard"): the sheltered, downwind side.

A sailboat leans away from the wind, so the leeward side is the low side and the windward side is the high side. Crew often sit on the windward side.

Here is the first rule that shapes everything: a sailboat cannot sail straight into the wind. Point the bow at the wind and the sails just flap and the boat stops. The wedge of directions you cannot sail in, roughly 45 degrees either side of the wind, is called the no-go zone.

Every other direction has a name. These are the points of sail, described by the angle between the boat and the wind:

• In irons: pointing straight at the wind, stopped. This is the no-go zone.
• Close-hauled: as close to the wind as the boat will sail, about 45 degrees off, with the sails pulled in tight.
• Close reach: a little further off the wind.
• Beam reach: wind straight across the side of the boat. Often the fastest and easiest point of sail.
• Broad reach: wind coming from behind the beam.
• Run: sailing with the wind directly behind you.

As you turn away from the wind you let the sails out. Close to the wind they are pulled in tight; running downwind they are right out.

One more pair of words. The tack you are on is the side the wind comes over. Wind over the port side is port tack; wind over the starboard side is starboard tack. Try the points-of-sail model below: turn the boat and watch the sails, and the name, change.

So if a boat cannot sail into the wind, how does it ever get somewhere upwind? This is the question everyone asks, and the answer is the heart of sailing.

A sail is a wing. Set correctly, a sail is not a bag catching wind. It is a wing standing on end. Wind flowing across its curved shape speeds up on the outside and slows on the inside, which creates a pressure difference that pulls the sail. This pull is called lift, and it is the same force that holds up an aircraft.

The pull does two jobs. That single pull can be split into two parts: a forward part that drives the boat along, and a sideways part that tries to push the boat over and sideways. When you are sailing close to the wind, most of the pull is sideways and only a little of it is forward.

The keel makes it work. This is where the keel earns its keep. Water does not let the deep keel move sideways easily, so the keel refuses the sideways part of the force while letting the boat move forward. Cancel the large sideways push and the small forward push is what remains, so the boat goes forward, even with the wind coming from ahead of the beam.

Because the sail still works at about 45 degrees off the wind, you can make progress toward the wind by sailing a zig-zag of angled legs across the no-go zone. Turning the bow from one of those legs to the other, through the wind, is called tacking.

The simulator below lets you see all of this. Turn the boat toward and away from the wind and watch the forward and sideways forces change. Then switch the keel off and watch the same wind simply shove the boat sideways.

Steering on a sailboat is described by where you turn relative to the wind, not by left and right. Two phrases cover it:

• Heading up (or luffing up): turning the bow toward the wind.
• Bearing away (or falling off): turning the bow away from the wind.

As you head up you pull the sails in. As you bear away you let them out. Head up too far, past close-hauled toward the wind, and the front of the sails begins to flap, or luff. Keep going and the boat stops head to wind, stuck in irons.

There are two ways to turn the boat so the wind crosses from one side to the other:

• Tacking: turning the bow through the wind. The boat passes briefly through the no-go zone and the headsail crosses to the new side. This is how you make ground upwind.
• Gybing: turning the stern through the wind, downwind. The boom swings across from one side to the other, so a gybe is done carefully and under control, and the crew keep their heads down when it is called.

Both moves are done with clear calls so the whole crew is ready. You do not need to perform them yet. For now, just learn the words, because you will hear them constantly on the water.

A calm, well-run boat is a safe boat. Most of staying safe is simple habits, learned early. It is also how you make yourself useful rather than in the way.

• One hand for the boat. When you move around, always keep one hand holding something solid. Boats move under you without warning, so hold on before you need to.
• Wear your PFD. A personal flotation device only works if it fits and you are wearing it. It should be snug: if it rises past your chin when someone lifts it at the shoulders, it is too loose. The rule is simple: on deck and underway, it is on.
• Mind the boom. The boom swings across the cockpit when the boat tacks or gybes, and it does so at head height. When you hear "ready about" or "ready to gybe," get your head below the boom and stay clear.
• Respect the winches and lines. A winch is the strongest machine on the boat and does not know your fingers are there. Keep your hand flat and your fingers clear of the drum. Never put a hand between a line and the winch, never stand inside a loop of rope, and never wrap a loaded line around your hand.

None of this needs to feel tense. Move deliberately, listen for the calls, and ask when you are unsure. That is exactly what good new crew do.

You do not need to sail the boat single-handed to be a valuable crew member on day one. A few simple jobs, done well and on time, make the whole boat run smoothly. Most of them happen when leaving and returning to the dock.

• Fenders: the soft cylinders you hang over the side to protect the hull against the dock. They go out before you come alongside and come in once you have left.
• Dock lines: the ropes that tie the boat to the dock. The main ones are the bow line and stern line, plus spring lines that stop the boat sliding forward and back.
• The cleat hitch: the knot that makes a line fast to a cleat. A full turn around the base, then a couple of figure-eights, then a locking turn laid flat. The same knot, tied the same way every time.

Coming and going. When you leave or arrive at a dock, the rule is to step, do not jump, and to hand a line across, not a person. If a gap needs a leap, the boat is not close enough yet, so the helm brings it in again. A slow, calm approach is the skill, not a fast one.

Clear communication. The crew works by simple calls that are answered, so everyone knows what is happening. The helm might call "ready to cast off?" and the crew answers "ready" only when it truly is. Repeating a command back is not fussy; it is how a boat avoids the one mistake at the wrong moment.

That is the whole foundation. In the sections that follow, and out on the water, you will put it to use.