Reefing Archives

Tag Archive for: Reefing

Essential Reefing a Sailboat Tips

August 29, 2012/by Grant Headifen

A good sailing tip would be to reef your boat early before the wind hits but even more essential reefing tips are embedded in this recent sailing event in Sydney Harbour, Australia. You can’t visit Sydney with out a sailing trip out on the harbour and Matt Hayes, owner of Sydney by Sail charter company […]

Reefing a Sailboat – HTML5 Animations

August 28, 2012/by Grant Headifen

Just posting here some fun and helpful animations of reefing the sails. The animation below represents where sails must be lowered. In the case of the headsail, it needs to be replaced with a smaller sail. Remember, the higher the number, the smaller the sail. This specific one represents where the boat is fitted with […]

When to reef a sailboat

December 7, 2011/by Grant Headifen

While all sailboat designs are different and will sail optimally at different heel angles and reef points, there are a few generalities that we’ll cover in this sailing blog. General reefing point number 1 through infinity: Don’t scare the beegeebees out of those on board by heeling the boat over too much. While you may […]

Reefing a Catamaran

September 10, 2011/by Grant Headifen

Here’s a question from a student. >>>>>>> Grant, I would like some clarification on the steps taken to reef a main sail on a cat. I’m going out on a 48ft cat and prob want to reef the sail before i go out…. Do i reef it while at the dock or in the water […]

Learning to sail in gusty conditions

March 10, 2009/by Grant Headifen

Yesterday I was out teaching on our new Beneteau 373. The conditions were extremely gusty. Lake Travis in Austin Texas is a great lake for sailing all year round and in the summer the water is so incredibly warm that you can swim while anchored in a cove still at 2am. There are lots of […]

Reef un reef reef unreef

January 3, 2009/by Grant Headifen

When you’re racing you need to get the most out of your rig and that’s exactly what we had to do in the Austin Yacht Club Red Eye January 1st Race event. While one weather channel was predicting 6-8 knots another was saying 15-20. In the last sailing blog I’d mentioned that we were going […]

Reefing

December 15, 2008/by Grant Headifen

After a cold front came through last week we decided to go out sailing – hey it’s Texas we can still sail this time of the year. The wind was up 20-25 knots. The not so great thing about sailing on Lake Travis in Austin however is the high hills and valleys surrounding it tend […]