I realize a sailboat can’t go directly at the wind (or maybe it can🤷🏽♂️) but for the life of me I can’t picture it going anywhere but where the wind is bowing.
Also, lets say you were in a round pond, could you sail to any point you wanted to in the pond with the wind blowing steady in one direction?
In: 34
A boat sails into the wind by using the sail as a wing. Normally, a sail works by being hit with wind and making a push force, but if you orient the sail *into* the window, like edge-on, it creates a lift force, a force side-to-side and not front-back.
So now the boat would want to skitter sideways, so you have to play some angles, you use the rudder and keel to minimize sideways motion. This bit is a little hard to explain without high-school level math and geometry, but you do all of this right, you can angle the sail, the wind, and the boat in such a way that you end up with the boat wanting to be pushed side-to-side *and* get pulled forward *into* the wind. The keel/rudder minimize the side-to-side motion and moving forward into the wind is what you wanted.
You can’t fully minimize the side-to-side skating so after a while the boat will be blown off course, so they basically do the opposite angles and stuff for a while floating the boat back the other way. This process of moving into the wind while being blown back and forth side-to-side is called ~~”tacking~~”.
EDIT – Multiple people have corrected that tacking is something else, the proper term is ‘beating’. Fun fact, I grew up on an island and am an extremely strong ~ semi-competitive open swimmer ~ and sailing terrifies me. Kudos to y’all, I’ll stay over here on my beach chair thank you very much.
Latest Answers