Talk:Point of sail

"A boat turns through the no-go zone as it tacks. " this is not correct a boat turns through the no-go zone when it gibes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.25.248.185 (talk) 02:30, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

When the wind is dead astern, the Jib can be "goose-winged" to the opposite side of the boat(a whisker pole comes in handy) so that the main and jib are spread apart and both can fill. this is called sailing by the lee, and can be hazardous if not watch closely. It is also the only point of sail that does not have leeway.

Sailing goosewinged is different from sailing by the lee. Sailing by the lee is when your sail is over the upwind side of your boat - i.e. the 'wrong' side. It's often done on near when sailing lasers (with the boat tilted as well - presumably to put the centre of effort over the boat.)

The article says that running downwind is the "no go zone". The diagram appears to contradict this, as the "don't go zone". The latter makes more sense, and I suspect a typo. However, I am not a sailor, so will not presume to correct it.

The picture is right: the no-go zone is on both sides of straight into the wind; when trying to sail farther upwind than close-hauled, there is a "dead angle" where the ship cannot go forward; that's why when the destination is straight upwind, the ship will have to "beat to windward" by sailing close-hauled on both tacks in alternation. Sailors of the old square-rigged three- or four-masters, which couldn't sail closer than 60° into the wind, used to say that going upwind means "twice the way [i.e. twice the path length] and thrice the time". OTOH, sailing before the wind (i.e. straight downwind) is always possible, and depending on how the ship is rigged it may be done with the mainsail on one side and the jib goose-winged on the other side (on a whisker pole), or with or without a jib but with a spinnaker.

And contrary to the first message (by 99.25.248.185) in this section, a sailing ship does indeed turn through the no-go zone as it tacks, and her inertia allows her to go from clause hauled on the port tack to close-hauled on the starboard tack or vice-versa. When gybing, the ship continues to be pushed by the wind, there isn't any no-go zone there, the only thing to watch for is that when passing the straight downwind position, the mainsail boom might pass brutally from all the way starboard to all the way port (or vice-versa), possibly even knocking the helmsman unconscious. — Tonymec (talk) 15:52, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

The article states: "Wind direction for points of sail always refers to the true wind..."

I have never seen any reliable source make this claim and a few days ago I added a CN tag. It was removed and the following book/page was cited:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Xe_i23UL4sAC&pg=PA41#v=onepage&q&f=false

But I see no support for this claim in that source.

Several years ago this topic came up - I'm not sure if it was on this talk page or another article's - but upon checking multiple sources the consensus was that point of sail was almost always introduced before apparent wind and none of the material bothered to go back and make the distinction. Seeing as how the citations did not clarify the matter we (the editors) agreed to elide over it as well. My take at the time (and still is) was that this isn't mathematics where terms come with precise definitions and while it would be nice to provide one, that's not our role as wikipedia editors.

So, I'm restoring the CN tag. I do not believe use of the word "always" is appropriate. Perhaps "usually" or "often" if we can find support in the reliable sources. Otherwise, "sometimes" may be acceptable if we can find even one source saying that the point of sail refers to the true wind. But I've never even seen that. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 14:26, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Mr swordfish, interesting question. I've never seen any discussion of point of sail that didn't use a diagram with the true wind to define such terms as close reach, beam reach, etc. "Close-hauled" is really a description of a sail setting, one which pertains to an iceboat on every point of sail, except downwind. Nonetheless, it may be appropriate to rephrase:

Wind direction for points of sail always refers to the true wind—the wind felt by a stationary observer. ...., to read:

A given point of sail (beating, close reach, beam reach, broad reach, and running downwind) is defined in reference to the true wind—the wind felt by a stationary observer—and, depending on boat speed, determines an appropriate sail setting, as determined by the apparent wind. .....

Look at the following references and see what you think:

• Maximum Sail Power—The Complete Guide to Sails, Sail Technology, and Performance Pp. 272-3
• The Annapolis Book of Seamanship P. 47
• Sailing Fundamentals P. 72

Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 22:29, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

I don't have access to the Anapolis Book of Seamanship or Maximum Sail Power, so I can't comment on those.

Sailing Fundamentals engages in the same "writing-around" behavior I've seen everywhere else. The diagram seems to imply that point of sail is relative to the true wind, but the text is silent. For instance, this excerpt:

"...a boat cannot sail directly into the wind. Instead, a boat sails at various angles to the wind the closest of which is about 45 degrees... The point of sail closest to the wind is close-hauled. The sails are sheeted in close to the boat, and the vessel is steered as close to the wind's direction as possible without the sails luffing." (emphasis mine)

Nowhere does the author clarify whether he is talking about the true wind or the apparent wind when he writes the wind. The mention of 45 degrees implies that he's talking about the true wind, but the next snippet is clearly implying that the apparent wind is what matters i.e. close hauled means sailing as close to the apparent wind as possible. And as per the usual exposition, all this discussion occurs prior to explaining apparent vs true wind so it wouldn't make sense to make the distinction. I assume that at some point the author gets around to apparent wind (I don't have access to the entire book) but if he's like every other source he doesn't circle back to points of sail and state what he meant by the wind.

I teach sailing and this question is common - are the points of sail relative to the true wind or the apparent wind? In all my reading, I've never seen a definitive answer. (other than here on this page) In practice, it doesn't really matter - close hauled means that if you turn to windward the boat slows down and you're at the minimum angle to both the true and apparent wind. If you're running, both true and apparent wind are from the stern unless the wind has suddenly shifted. Whether a beam reach means 90 degrees from the true wind or 90 degrees from the apparent wind probably doesn't matter in practice, so nobody bothers to make the distinction in the reliable sources. Likewise, the same course may be a "close reach" or a "broad reach" depending on whether one is referring to the true or apparent wind, but few sailors engage in this kind of hair-splitting, so again it probably doesn't matter.

BTW, I'd be happy to simply state in the article that point of sail is defined relative to the true wind. But I've never actually seen it stated directly in any of the reliable sources I've read. And my understanding of how Wikipedia works is that we can't make that claim without a reliable source. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 14:33, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, Mr. Swordfish. You're telling me that when you clicked on the following links, you weren't able to see or navigate to the pages cited? They definitely represent true wind, the wind that one sees on the water or on flags, ashore.

• Maximum Sail Power—The Complete Guide to Sails, Sail Technology, and Performance Pp. 272-3
• The Annapolis Book of Seamanship P. 47
• Sailing Fundamentals P. 72

Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 17:02, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

The links didn't work for me yesterday. Today the Anapolis Book of Seamanship link is working. I found another link for the other book at

http://www.brianhancock.org/assets/maximum_sail_power.pdf

Both define or describe the points of sail in relation to the wind e.g. from the Max Sail Power glossary Beam Reach entry: "a point of sail where the boat is sailing at right angles to the wind." (emphasis mine). The Anapolis Book treats point of sail on page 47 and does apparent wind on page 48, but like every other reference I've seen fails to clarify which it was talking about previously.

So, I'm not seeing what you're seeing. i.e. a clear statement that "points of sail are defined in relation to the true wind" I could be persuaded that the implication is strong enough for us to be able to make that claim, but it would be better to find an actual example of some reference stating it directly. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 21:43, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Mr. Swordfish, all the diagrams show "the wind", which is clearly the true wind. Is there another interpretation that you see? HopsonRoad (talk) 23:20, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with your interpretation of the diagram(s). What gives me pause is the fact that I've looked at dozens of reliable sources and have yet to find a single one that states this explicitly. Maybe interpretation and inference is enough here, and maybe it isn't. Curious what other editors think. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 01:40, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Mr. Swordfish, I think that the missing link is: In a diagram it's unnecessary to point out that the wind depicted is the "true wind", whereas from the point of view of a person on a moving platform—a sailor in our case—it requires clarification that what feels like the wind, the apparent wind, is different from the true wind and therefore both components of the wind vector diagram need a name to explain what's going on. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 02:24, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Gentlemen, may I give you the point of view of someone who used to sail? Maybe it will be relevant to your discussion, maybe it won't.

• “Close-hauled” is as close to the no-go zone as the ship can go and still make head. How close that is depends on the construction of the ship and of its rigging: for modern racing yachts it may be as close as 30°, for dinghies such as a Vaurien it may be 45°, for a full-rigged threemaster 60° was a performance, and among their sailors the saying went that beating into the wind was twice the way and thrice the time.
• Running is of course at 180° from wherever the wind is coming from, and in that case the true and apparent wind blow in the same direction but not with the same force.
• All the rest (except into the no-go zone) is reaching, but in that case it is difficult to sense exactly from onboard ship where the “true” wind is coming from. All sails on the same tack but “almost” before the wind is broad reaching; a little wider than close-hauled is close reaching; where exactly between them you get the true wind just straight from port or starboard is hard to tell, the only wind that can be felt onboard is the so-called “apparent” wind, which for a sailor is the actual “true” wind, though it is almost always slightly more forward than what meteorologists on ground tell you. So if the navigator logged “beam reaching, port tack” in the logbook, you can bet that it's the apparent wind which was coming straight abeam from port.

(probably irrelevant) OTOH when estimating the course made good, all components of the drift (both wind drift and current drift) have to be taken into account, and if you've been sailing on both tacks 30° from the wind you felt, your course made good won't be that close to the point "straight into the wind" toward which you've been beating. Happily the compass tells you where you're heading, the log boat or log fish tells you how fast, but you still need to watch your wake to estimate your angle of drift relative to the current, and then add the current velocity vectorially to your speed on water. — Tonymec (talk) 23:52, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

HopsonRoad, sorry to trouble you, but I'm a bit confused by this edit. I wanted to add a picture of a boat in irons, and thought that's what this showed; can you explain? I'd tend to say the sails of these iceboats are slatting (if it was excessively vigorous, I might say "flogging"), but I used "flapping" as I thought readers would be more likely to understand. "Luffing" I tend to think of as what the sail does at the edge of the no-go zone; that is, "You're luffing" is said just as the sail starts to flutter a little, locally. THis could be a regional difference of some sort. HLHJ (talk) 03:02, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

No trouble at all, HLHJ! Thank you for engaging here. I struggled with the question of luffing vs being in irons. In reviewing several dictionaries, I agree with your assessment that my usage is off. "Flapping" would be better. There's still the question of whether the boat is in irons. And, upon further consideration, it could be regarded as such. (Although, one could probably get into the iceboat, push the boom outwards and steer in the opposite direction and move forward, unlike recovery from irons when afloat, where one backs up.) I couldn't find a different/better example of being in irons in Wikimedia, so let's work with this. I'll take another stab at the caption to work in the word "irons". Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 16:33, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, HopsonRoad, the new caption is much better! I like "parked", it's not jargon but it does succinctly give an accurate idea of the situation. I'll try to improve the article body text a bit, but it seems some of the terms have changed over time, so avoiding recentism may be a research task. And maybe a link to Wiktionary would work better. HLHJ (talk) 04:26, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi HLHJ and thank you for your extensive work in this article! I wonder at changing the order of presentation from head-to-wind to dead-downwind. Most treatises start at the top of the diagram. I appreciate that you're trying to explain to the uninitiated, but this order seems odd to the "initiated"! Perhaps returning to the original order, but with the easier-to-follow explanations of each is an appropriate compromise. I wonder if some of the current text strays from WP:TONE. I've tried to streamline some of what I've found. I'll be looking at other passages, later. Thanks, again! Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 14:42, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

It's certainly a major re-org, and without prior discussion on the talk page. We should take a critical look at the changes to see if they are really an improvement. I'm definitely of the school that thinks these articles should be written for the uninitiated rather than for people who already know the material. Not sure if the recent changes are consistent with that view. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 00:32, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Sure, sorry, I should maybe have discussed it. I'm not really attached to any particular wording, order or content. I find it's generally pretty easy to explain why a sailboat goes downwind, and hard to explain why it goes upwind, which is why I re-ordered it (based on verbally explaining it to people). I had no idea that there was a conventional order. We could flip the lede diagram, with the disadvantage that downwind would no longer be down; but I don't think it matters if we cover the diagram in a bottom-to-top order. Mentioning that one can sail faster than the wind on some courses, and some explanation of why in terms of basic physics, would be good. Lots of people understand some physics but not sailing, and I feel it's generally a good idea for an encyclopedia to connect topics. I find the whole lift-vs-drag discussion a bit complex and low in explanatory value, so I'd be fine with moving it to a special section later in the article, with some explanation of what it means in practical terms. I haven't managed to find a suitably-licensed polar plot of sailing speed yet, but I think such a diagram would improve the article. Generally, this is a fairly spatial topic, where diagramsa are useful; if you can imagine any in particular, I'm willing to make some. On tone, I've tried to introduce jargon as I go along; completely removing it would, I think, have an Up-goer Five effect (I assume that it's this, and not, say, the formality level, which strays from WP:TONE). But there's an arguement for just not mentioning more jargon. I'll try and aim at being understandable to people with no background knowledge. HLHJ (talk) 02:08, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

HLHJ and Mr swordfish, terms in this article are sometimes introduced in "quotation marks", at other times with italics, and sometimes they are linked. I suggest that we identify a preferred convention and stick to it throughout the article. I recommend quotation marks, when a term is introduced and no quotation marks, thereafter as the terms are normally written, leaving italics for other opportunities for emphasis. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 00:10, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good; on first use, quotes, and quotes plus wl where the wikilink is available. HLHJ (talk) 00:11, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

I see that MOS:WORDSASWORDS specifies: "Use italics when writing about words as words, or letters as letters (to indicate the use–mention distinction)." It provides examples. This means that we should introduce words with italics. HopsonRoad (talk) 17:37, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

User:Qtrfoil, sailing terminology does indeed conflate sail trim (e.g. "close-hauled" = "sheeted in") with a point of sail close to the eye of the wind, close-hauled, when ice boats, high-performance dinghies, catamarans and foiling sailboats have their sails trimmed in for a range of points of sail. However, the point of sail remains in reference to the true wind. Increasing speed of the sailing craft brings the apparent wind progressively forward for points of sail where the sail can act like an airfoil (typically 45 to 135 degrees off the true wind) and the craft's speed can exceed that of the wind, rather than a parachute (typically 135 to 180 degrees off the true wind) when the speed of the sailing craft cannot exceed that of the wind, and progressively necessitates sheeting in the sails. Sincerely, HopsonRoad (talk) 03:39, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I've sailed foiling Moths and Nacras (poorly), generations of sailboards, raced everything from Lasers through 505s (!) to larger offshore yachts, and am both a parachutist and an aerospace engineer. I'm curious about any recent source for the statement that describes point of sail wrt true wind, especially since, say, 2013's America's Cup 34. I think it's just not universally useful, and a modern citation might be valuable. However, I also can't find a source that explicitly supports my position that the point of sail is wrt the apparent wind (though here we see that reaching is simply described as "the process by which the wind is coming *across the boat* [emphasis added] [¹]) so I'll gladly leave the page as it is, my mistake. Equally, I wonder if the concept of upwind and downwind must now be defined more precisely, as Sir Ben Ainslie speaks to.[²]

I'd suggest that any sail, hard or soft, is an aerofoil, with high pressure on one side and low pressure on the other and providing useful motion. Asymmetric camber wings, such as a variable camber hard sail or even fully-battened soft sails, can generate lift even at some negative AOA. Of course, and recognizing that you wrote "typically," efficient fore and aft-rigged sails still "act like an airfoil," continuing to generate lift and even useful VMG, well higher than 45 degrees off true wind.[³][⁴] We know we use this somewhat often, perhaps in racing at the starting line or to juuust make a mark as the wind shifts.

And the boat speed of a low-drag craft sailing "downwind" can certainly exceed that of the wind, or an AC72 would gybe instead of tack to a leeward mark.[²] Here we see that an AC72's boat speed ranges from 23 to 45 knots in 20 knots of wind between between 120° and 170° [³] for example, and here an AC35 makes 45+ knots in 17 knots of wind at 130° off true wind and 35+ knots VMG at 150° knots of wind[⁴], while a Moth makes 11 knots boat speed in 10 knots of wind at 130° .[⁵] Fascinating, to me at least, and, rather to my larger point - paradigm shifting.

I wonder if we're a little stuck in a concept that has been true for centuries, but is arguable now. I might just remove the word "true" from the lead sentence in the article and leave it at that. Anyway, I'll agree that I'm certainly not the one to "fix" all of humanity, so I'll just watch this discussion in the years ahead. Cheers!

¹ https://asa.com/news/2022/12/06/points-of-sail/

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAmUcRdqhjU&t=20s

³ https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/wind_response/ac72.html

⁴ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/AC35-Challenger-Finals-Race-4-Comparison-of-Race-Data-from-SWE-to-AC50-VPP-output-for_fig8_351615999

⁵ https://www.boatdesign.net/attachments/foils-moth-thesis-boegle-pdf.77496/ pg 21 Qtrfoil (talk) 17:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the above, none of which (including the polar diagrams) contradicts what I described above and is covered in High-performance sailing#Apparent wind sailing. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 21:38, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I've sailed some sailing dinghies and occasionally some sand yachts, and the way the latter accelerate as you sheet in the sails when broad reaching (relative to the true wind) takes some getting used to. I think that the convention that points of sail are relative to the true wind, even though what the sails feel is the apparent wind, is a useful one, otherwise sand yachts should always be sailed close-hauled except when in the no-go zone or when running straight downwind (and the best route for steering a sand yacht downwind is to tack down the wind, if there is room for it and at low tide there usually is). IMHO in case of doubt we can specify explicitly if we are talking about an angle away from the true wind or about a more or less sheeted-in sail position, or even both in the same sentence, as in When a sand yacht is broad reaching relative to the true wind, its sails should be progressively sheeted in until it is close hauled relative to the apparent wind. — Tonymec (talk) 02:53, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

That sounds very reasonable. It depends on the context, so it's best to explicitly say what you mean. If you talk about sail trim, you very likely refer to the apparent wind. But when performing navigational tasks like putting laylines on the chart or computing VMG, then you definitely do this relative to the direction of true wind. BTW I made a nicer drawing of the points of sail https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Points_of_Sail.svg maybe you want to use it. Quantenschaum42 (talk) 23:20, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Quantenschaum42, I like your new drawing! Could you replace the "Upwind" label with "Close reach"? This would correspond to the discussion in the article. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 01:04, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I updated the drawing. Quantenschaum42 (talk) 09:01, 22 December 2024 (UTC)