Jerry looked at the buoy. “That’s a special marker,” he answered. “All of the striped buoys have some special meaning, and it’s usually marked on the charts. They’re mostly used to mark a junction of two channels, or a middle ground, or an obstruction of some kind. You can sail to either side of them, but you shouldn’t go too close. At least that’s the rule for the horizontally striped ones. The markers with vertical stripes show the middle of the channel, and you’re supposed to pass them as close as you can, on either side.”
Another few minutes of sailing brought them past the last red buoy, and they were clear of the marked channel. From here on they were free to sail as they wanted, in any direction they chose to try.
For the next hour they practiced reaching. With the wind blowing steadily from the starboard side, the trim sloop leaned far to the port until the waves were creaming almost up to the level of the deck. Jerry explained that this leaning position, called “heeling,” was the natural and proper way for a sailboat to sit in the water. The only way that a boat could sail level, he pointed out, was before the wind. With the boat heeling sharply and the sails and the rigging pulled tight in the brisk breeze, Sandy really began to feel the sense of speed on the water, and understood what Jerry had told him about speed being relative.
After they had practiced on a few long reaches, Jerry showed Sandy how to beat or point, which is the art of sailing more or less straight into the wind.
“Of course you can’t ever sail straight into the wind,” Jerry said. “The best you can do is come close. If you head right into it, the sails will just flap around the way that they did when we were pointing into the wind at the mooring. You’ve got to sail a little to one side.”
“Suppose you don’t want to go to one side?” Sandy asked. “If the wind is blowing straight from the place you want to get to, what do you do about it?”
“You have to compromise,” Jerry replied. “You’ll never get there by aiming the boat in that direction. What you have to do is sail for a point to one side of it for a while, then come about and sail for a point on the other side of it for a while. It’s a kind of long zigzag course. You call it tacking. Each leg of the zigzag is called a tack.”
Sailing into the wind, they tacked first on one side, then on the other. Each time they came about onto a new tack, the mainsail was shifted to the other side of the boat, and the boat heeled in the same direction as the sail. The jib came about by itself, just by loosening one sheet and taking up on the other one. Soon Sandy was used to the continual shifting and resetting of the sails, and to the boom passing back and forth overhead.
Suddenly Sandy pointed and clapped Jerry on the shoulder with excitement. “Look!” he cried. “There’s a whole fleet of boats coming this way! They look just like ours! And they’re racing!”
Jerry looked up in surprise. “They sure are racing! And they are just like this one! I guess I was wrong when I said they didn’t race this kind of boat. This must be a local class, built to specifications for local race rules. Boy, look at them go! I was wrong about not racing them, but I sure was right when I said that she looked fast!”