Cav 28 steering

[jeffwr...@gmail.com]

Does anyone out there have any advice on heavy steering when the wind comes up a bit. My wife has trouble handling the tiller once the wind gets up. Some people say to head up or release the main but this seems to defeat the purpose of trying to maintain speed. A friend has said that the rudder might be the problem. He says a certain percentage of the surface should be forward of the pivot point. So, any suggestions or is this just a common problem or are we just hopeless?
Regards, Jeff

[John MacLeod]

Hi Jeff

A few thoughts for you. Rounding up is caused by too much power developing on the mainsail. Because it is aft of the mast, power in the main tends to rotate the boat towards the wind.

So what you need to do is depower the main to stop the rotation.

To your point about maintaining soeed, when the wind is up, you generally have considerably more power than you need to keep up speed. So the challenge becomes how you get rid of all that power - particularly in the main.

You have several choices:

1) Flatten the main. A flat sail develops less power, just like the wing of a plane. The bottom 1/3 of the main is flattened by pulling the foot of the main towards the end of the boom by using the outhaul. The rest of the main is flattened by pulling on the backstay. This causes the mast to bend and flatten the sail. For the backstay to be effective at its job, you need to put some pressure on the baby stay (the inner forestay) as that provides a leverage point to help bend the mast.

2) Let the main out either by dropping the traveler down the track or by easing the mainsheet. (Opinions vary as to which is preferable!) This is the best way to respond when a gust hits as it is the quickest & easiest thing to do.

3) Reduce the size of the main by reefing.

Generally, you should flatten the main (1) first as the wind gets up. If that's not enough to ease the steering then let the main out (2) and if that's not enough put a reef in the main (3). By that time however, it's probably time to go home!!

Hope this helps some. Very happy to have a chat on the phone if you'd like. Let me know & I'll email my number.

Best regards

John

[jeffwr...@gmail.com]

Thanks for your help John. The one thing we haven't tried is the backstay. Also, being beginners we have only loosened the outhaul in light winds when we had run out of other things to do. We are hopefully going out on Wednesday and will try what you have said. Will let you know what happens.
Jeff