How to Determine Sailing Leeway

Easy Steps for Sailors

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• sailing
• cruising
• tacking
• beating
• to
• windward
• seamanship
• navigation
• seasensical

[seasensical]

You make valid points. My goal with these videos is to project useful information in short, bit-sized pieces. That's much easier to grasp for the majority of viewers. As a former professional maritime instructor, I would give much lengthier discussion in a chalk-and-talk classroom environment. But on the web, short, brief, to-the-point is easier for the audience to grasp--and remember. Thanks again for your comments.

Captain John

[uuguru]

Note that the use of GPS and charting you track line onto your map, affords the best degree of calculating a compensating course alteration.

[uuguru]

So while judging the signifigance of any amount of sideslip is at times useful, that knowledge and it's use are chiefly beneficial over short distances when racing or near hazardous objects, but moreover it's useful on long hauls, again only when current and wind directions are consisten and again particularly when the wind is close to or directly off your vessel's beam.

[uuguru]

As for determining the amount of sideslip over a given distance and then calculating that distance against your forward travel, this results in an accurate means of determining a compensating angular degree, but it's reliability depends on pre-supposing that your measured sideslip (for port and/or starboard tack/jibs) are occurring consistently with unchanging directions and speeds of wind and current.

[uuguru]

I think that since leeway is how much the vessel sideslips over a period of time and results in a curved course, measuring and correcting for leeway is really only significantly useful in a few instances, ie; minimizing travel time, avoiding charted or known hazards and mostly just while navigating closest to directly across wind (as leeway becomes neglible the closer one travels either up or down wind).

[uuguru]

And the video (at least to me) could have better explained that the degree of the  offset wake waves (the angled difference from a perfectly trailing wake) is how one may deduce the degree of occurring sideslip.

[uuguru]

Agreeably the video's mentioned simplistic way in roughly judging the degree and/or existence of significant sideslip/leeway, is as described, ie; by looking at any noticable offset of your trailing wake's asymetric variance, however the video (at least to me) didn't quite make it clear enough that a noticeable variance from a perfectly following trail of a set of wake's two waves, is used to roughly judge if sideslip is significant.

[staliax]

wish this was in greek too:-))

very useful anyway:-)

nice work!

thnx