How to sail in big waves
Toby Heppell is the Sailing Editor for Yachting Monthly. He has been sailing all his life and has been writing about it for more than 15 years.
Sailing in waves can be a jarring, juddering experience, making for a long and uncomfortable passage, a thrilling surfing ride to your destination or, at worst, a dangerous, boat-rolling hazard.
Understanding how to set up your boat for differing wave conditions, to take advantage of them or ameliorate their worst traits is a skill that it is well worth understanding and practising in order to make your sailing more enjoyable, and to give you the confidence to sail in a wider range of conditions.
DOWNWIND
‘Fairly obviously, the bigger the boat you sail the less of a problem waves generally are,’ say Merfyn Owen of Owen Clark Yacht Design, himself a double Cape Horner and former BT Global Challenge skipper with over 250,000 miles under his belt. ‘To take that to an extreme, if you think about an oil tanker in the middle of an ocean, a wave that would barely wet the deck for her would be something big enough to roll a cruising yacht. It’s really all about the wave energy transfer and the object that the energy is being transferred through, in this case, the boat. So although size is key, when sailing with waves, speed is very much your friend, too, as the energy transfer will be reduced when you are travelling at pace.’
The ‘speed is your friend’ attitude can be difficult to get your head around. Typically it feels counterintuitive when sailing in big waves to want to speed up. Usually in these sort of extreme conditions, slower tends to feel safer but it is something we should all be trying to do in a following sea, to reduce the chance of broaching or being rolled.
‘If you take a fairly modern boat, they all tend to be easier to sail downwind in big waves for a couple of reasons, but one of the key reasons is that they are able to achieve higher sustained speeds downwind,’ says Neil Mackley of North Sails. ‘These days double digits downwind are not uncommon and even high teens are fairly regularly seen. You don’t have to go back too
