IUP Students,
You can join the sailing club with no prior experience. IUP classmates and Prof Sherwood will teach you on the water each Sunday. At weekly club meetings we conduct a brief shore-school. Here are the slides for preview or review:
A first, small boat sailors may find the moves involved in a tack feel unnatural. But if you practice the motions — beginning with proper form and sitting on the windward side of the boat, it will become almost automatic.
Here’s a good breakdown of the steps in slow motion on land. This basic process holds for any size sailboat from 10 to 20 feet.* Practice this and you’ll tack consistently, and you won’t end up on the low side of the boat, tangled up in the sheet or dropping the tiller!
(*US Sailing does not emphasize easing the mainsheet to slow the boat; there may be some situations where this is a good idea. Also, I’d like to see the skipper not move the rudder so much when he is switching hands).
This second video demonstrates a few common mistakes. Avoid these!
We have some beginners in the club and some sailors wanting to learn to race. Here are some introductory slides on the points of sail. Then we transition to how you can sail upwind for fun and in racing, by understanding your lay-lines and playing the lifts and headers. Slides
Many years ago at Yellow Creek, the park would rent out a sailboat to anyone who could properly rig one! They figured that though lots of people “say” they know how to sail, if someone can rig the boat, they must know what they’re doing!
Rigging usually involves:
But each boat is a little different. Each club and boat owner may have a different habit as to how they set it up or put it away.
This year, IUP has new Club FJ sailboats. We’ll be rigging them for the first time, starting from the basics (putting the boats together after storage) .
Here’s a great setup video, where two teens put together an FJ
Every time you sail, there’s a process to launch the boat. Below is a very good tutorial from the Columbia U sailing club. There are slight variations among FJs of different years, but this is basically how our boats will be set up.
Here is a simple step by step PDF.
For a very detailed guide, download this draft FJ Rigging Procedures PDF for FJs at Yellow Creek (FOYC/IUP).
IUP students can learn to sail with their peers and the guidance of certified US Sailing instructors. You don’t need experience or to have been sailing before. One fun and useful skill to pick up — even before it is warm enough to get on a boat — is how to tie some common sailing knots.
The classics that every sailors should know are:
There are many online resource but these videos make it simple to practice.