I tried to google it and it left me very confused.
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When I first learned to sail I remember this being confusing. The short answer is that of course a sailboat cannot literally sail directly into the wind. What they can do is sail at a diagonal to the wind. A sail is a wing. If the wind is blowing across the wing, it generates “lift” except the lift in this case is sideways so to speak, meaning the lift is “pulling” the sailboat forward. That still doesn’t mean you can sail directly into the wind, but you can zig zag back and forth across the wind slowing making progress on average in the direction of the wind. It’s tedious and slow but it works.
Note also that it’s not something that’s easy to describe in words but it’s really easy imo to see it visually on a diagram. I would look for these cute pictures of sail boats drawn from an overhead view where you can see the direction of the boat, the direction of the wind and the direction of the sail.
First, understand an airplane wing and lift. The shape of the wing causes air to flow over the rounded top of the wing and creat a vacuum or lift. A sail is a vertical wing. So, if facing into the wind, the if the rounded part of the sail is bulging to the left, “lift” with suck the boat to the left and vice-versa
If you’v every played Goldeneye on N64, imagine that your main joystick is broken and you can’t just push up and go forward. You can still move around by angling yourself sideways and using the yellow buttons to strafe from side to side.
You do that.
They go at an angle to the wind, then back on the other angle.
They take two sides of a triangle instead of the shortest path which would be the third side.
Step aside my boys, I got this.
Imagine a wedge shape on a table. If you push straight down on it, it moves left. Your finger keeps sliding downward and the wedge gets “squeezed out” between the force of your finger and the table.
If you push down at an angle from the right, it also moves left. But if you push down at a slight angle from the left… wait… *it still moves left?* How? That’s because your finger is still sliding down the slope of the wedge, and its slight force toward the table is still squeezing the wedge out to the left.
The wind is your finger, the sail is the slope of the wedge, and the keel on the ocean is the table. With a shallow enough wedge shape, you could sail into the wind at a pretty steep angle.
I’m going to add a link as I don’t actually know enough about the subject to try and ELI5 but a lot of the comments seem to be addressing a situation where the ship isn’t *quite* sailing properly upwind as this is impossible.
To sail directly into a headwind old ships during the Napoleonic Wars would [tack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)) into the wind. Browse at your disposal :))
There is a sheet of plywood on the outside of someone’s house where a guy drew how this was possible to explain it to me. Then we stapled it to the exterior studs.
I don’t think this is something you can explain to anyone like they’re 5. It involves some pretty complex physics.
Think about a blade on a wind turbine. Because it is fixed on the hub and has a cool shape all it wants to do when the wind blows is move sideways.
Now imaging sticking one on top of a boat. It still wants to move sideways but without a hub it just goes downwind instead of upwind.
A solution is to stick another blade under the boat and because it is in “wet” wind which is a lot more dense it can be a lot smaller and all it wants to do is also move sideways too.
They work against each other in a simple upwind or downwind consideration but they work in concert for sideways movement because they are both headed in the same direction. As the speed increases the wet blade “lifts” more that the dry one so the boat heads upwind at an angle.
They can’t sail directly into the wind. what they can do is sail diagonally somewhat toward the wind (some craft can point closer to the wind than others). they do this in one direction, quickly snap to the other direction so as not to lose momentum, and repeat.
By doing this, they can zigzag along toward the direction the wind is blowing from. It takes much longer and needs some planning
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