Bull Sails. Sailmakers

Losing the kite A lot can go wrong on the race track and retrieving the spinnaker is one area that is fraught with danger and too often goes wrong. A successful drop relies on a few key points. It is a drill that involves multiple crewmembers all working in synchronisation. They must all be able to do their roles in the right sequence. So allow a lot of time for each to do their job. One of the bigger issues these days is to find regular crew and this can be a real problem for a lot of racing boats. If you have a chopping and changing of the guard on a regular basis then it is important to have a default setting for your spinnaker work. This would entail a tried and true retrieval system that is fairly safe. A familiar dousing technique enables you to incorporate a few newbies into their roles with a minimum of fuss. Be precise with your instructions of when and where they need to be and what they need to do and look out for them. You can work all this out doing very conservativ...

The rise and fall of the sea is one of those phenomena that occur as a constant. The waxing and waning of the moon have always had a bearing on our lives. This pattern repeats itself at incredibly regular intervals and as we know it waits for no man. King Canute once famously tried to order the tide to stay back to prove his supremacy which was a spectacular failure. But in fairness to old Canute it must be said it was probably to prove the folly of human self-significance to others. Tide has always played a role in waterborne transport harking back to the birth of civilization in the Nile delta.  One thing we know is that seafarers who used the tide to their advantage in war or commerce have always had a healthy edge over their rivals. This is also the case with yacht racing; there are those who embrace it and succeed and those who are intimidated by it and fail. Knowledge- We needs to understand how the tide works on a certain area in order to be able to utilise it. The a...