The Fine Art of Tacking

420's on Southport Harbor in Long Island Sound.
If you ever get the chance to see a dinghy race,
you will truly get a better understanding of what God sees
when we tack a boat

Pick up any book on sailing, take any class or check out any instructional Youtube video and within the first ten minutes of any of them, you will hear the term “ to tack” or “tacking”. That is kind of ironic because in sailing jargon, this particular word has three different meanings with a general definition that is completely different than the sailing ones. And we wonder why new sailors get confused? 

For the purpose of this article “tacking” or “to tack a boat” means very simply to turn the bow of a boat through the wind. Here’s how it works:

Picture, if you will, a chalkboard with an arrow pointing downward from the top of the board  where the “wind” is represented by said arrow. Now draw a circle beginning at that arrow and go all the way, 360 degrees, either direction, around and back to the top. That is the sailing clock. And roughly from midnight (where the wind is) to approximately 10 and 2 on either side  is upwind sailing and you can’t sail in those directions. Boats don’t do it by rules of physics so don’t even try. 

But if you want to go that direction, (i.e. directly up wind towards midnight on the sailing clock) Then you have to zig zag your way as close to the wind as possible and that my friend is “tacking”. Literally going from 45 degrees off the wind on one side,(i.e. 2 O’clock),  and then turning your boat through midnight on the clock and going 45 degrees to the other side beyond 10 o’clock. 

That is to say in a perfect world, where all things theoretical worked out, that is how a tack would work on a boat. But rarely, if  ever, do things work that way. 

 That’s kind of what makes sailing an art form though and not a science. Nothing ever works exactly the way it should and tacking like the rest of sailing, is full of happy little accidents. 

Now that I have a fuzzy haired PBS artist in your head painting happy little rocks and trees, you can approach this idea with the appropriate degree of humor, because as a beginner sailor you must learn to laugh. Don’t take it so seriously. Odds are you will flub your tacks on your boat more times than not because ultimately you are asking God, Posiedon, Mother Nature and Isaac Newton to all work together to seamlessly and magically get a giant lump of varied flotsam to literally float its way through water and wind to go in your desired direction. It’s a miracle when it works and when it does, the sailing education world calls that the “eureka moment”. As in, "Eureka It worked!!” 

Most boats that you will want to sail are comfortable and by definition comfortable boats don't tack well. To be comfortable, boats are usually wide and beamy like a catamaran and can go in really shallow water. Fat and shallow does not make a boat tack well at all. Boats that like to tack are thin like a watermelon seed and wide like a sea gull’s wing span. If you think about it,  all a monohull sailboat really is, is an airplane on its side going through the water. Your mast and sail is one wing and your keel is another, with your hull being the fuselage in the middle. 

All these parts are supposed to work together to get a sailboat to tack through the wind effectively.  But usually, humans get involved and make, what should be a perfect simple machine, not work. 

Me on a the 74' schooner. Look at the tiny little jib and its no
wonder why that 53 ton behemoth refused to tack

Now as all good sailing instructors and captains have a pile of sea stories to share, I will tell you my perfunctory sea story on “tacking”. I was in command of a 74’ schooner in Pamlico Sound, North Carolina making a run back from Ocracoke. It was well past 2 AM and the wind had settled down to a gentle breeze out of the East with clear skies and warm Carolina summer humidity filling the air. The diesel was secured and my crew of 12 kids and the boat’s owner were sleeping soundly. And in the distance, off my starboard bow, I could see and hear the buoy at Brandt’s Shoals approaching quickly. 

The light flashed and lit the flat calm waters for miles and every time it flashed I could see the water lapping at the barely exposed beach directly behind the buoy. That meant my boat would not sail over that shoal. I checked the GPS and compared it to my chart and I knew I had about a half mile until I had to tack which wouldn’t be long going 5 knots.

Let me tell you, when the owner of a boat is on board, you question every decision you make. Do I start the motor? Do I furl the sails? Do I wake everyone up tacking at 2 AM? He signs the checks, right? 

I should have tacked well away from the shoal but the sleeping crew were sleeping so soundly that I delayed my decision as long as I could and I didn't want to look like a worry wart in front of the boat’s owner. 

What looked like a half mile quickly turned into feet and the shallow water alarm began squawking at me. The Light on the Buoy lit up my entire deck and the lapping water rang out in the silence of the night air. I knew I was going aground 10 miles from anything and smack dab in the middle of a Marine Corp Bombing range at 2 AM in the morning if I didn’t tack the boat right now and get into deeper water. 

I slammed the helm over and the steel hull creaked as the bow worked up on the wind. It edged slowly towards the midnight mark on the sailing clock and stopped. I didn’t have enough speed to make the 53 ton steel hulk turn against the diminishing East Wind. The irony was I had more than enough inertia to hit the shoal at 5 knots, but not enough inertia to complete a full tack. I fell off, and filled the sails again. The boat came back to life and picked up speed  as the sound of the buoy bell fell aft. 

I tried once again slamming the wheel over as quickly as I could, this time sheeting in the jib as tight as I could make it. The theory, if I could get the bow just a few degrees past the wind, I could back wind the jib and use the pressure to swing the bow the rest of the way through the luffing arc (that spot between 10 and 2 on the sailing clock). It was no good, the hull went limp and the slight breeze made our jib twitch like a bird with a broken wing. All the while the shallow water alarm screamed at me. The boat crew and owner began to stir. 

With nothing left to do and no desire to get out and push a 50 ton steel hull off a Marine Corp Bombing beach, I fired up the 500 horse diesel monster. The boat shuddered violently and the smell of diesel fumes filled the otherwise silent boat. I could hear the sound of water puking from the stern freeing port underneath the rumble of the motor that filled the increasingly steamy wheel house and cabin. All the other noises of the sultry North Carolina night disappeared. 

Keeping the wheel hard over, I threw the throttle into gear. The  jib came to life and flapped ferociously, slapping the head of one of the boys on my crew who had slipped on to the fore deck unseen to escape the accumulated body heat of 12 boys packed into a steel hull with no portholes, one head and one 12-volt oscillating fan. 

Swinging the bow through the wind, I released the jib sheet hoping to relieve the boy of the lashing he was receiving from a protesting boat that my pride had put in peril. Thinking better of it, I hauled on the roller furler and cleared the windshield to see the glistening stars reflecting on the open water horizon. The shallow water alarm quit its protest and went quietly back to sleep and from the berth behind me I could hear the owner roll out of his bunk and slap his feet on the warm deck. “Gave up on sailing, huh?” he yawned. “Yup, didn’t think you wanted to walk in from Brandt shoals”, I said. “Oh that’s a shame. It was quite pleasant for a while there.” I closed the conversation saying, “Well this might get a little wind down below and clean the bugs off the main”. 

The ICW is a lousy place to practice tacking but sure makes for a nice photo

Before I knew it, the boat was rumbling up the channel towards home and the boys were sleeping soundly again. The flecks of the morning sun would be seen soon enough and the night I almost ran a 50 ton vessel into Brandt's Shoals would be over. But I learned a great lesson that night. There are no points awarded for pride on a boat and the time to tack is when you first think of it. Because it truly is a miracle when a giant hunk of lifeless boat floats effortlessly though the wind and settles on a 90 degree course change in a whole new direction. 

For more please check out this article at
https://www.lifeofsailing.com/post/what-is-tacking-how-to-tack-a-sailboat