He watched Jerry carefully, and, following his instructions, started to haul in on the mainsheet. It came very lightly and easily. Remembering the terrific force of the jibe on the first day’s sailing, though, Sandy knew enough not to be fooled by appearances. He shortened the sheet so that he would not be taken unawares when the wind caught the mainsail on its new tack.
A few seconds of hauling and shortening brought the mainsail directly over the center of the boat, with the sheet securing it tightly against the dangerous sudden jibe. Then, as Jerry brought the sloop about hard on her new course, the wind took the sail. The boat heeled far over, leaning its lee side into the waves through which they were cutting with a new speed.
Sandy held hard to the sheet, the pull of which was almost cutting his hand. The load of wind in the taut sail transmitted its strength to the sheet, and became a hauling, tug-of-war enemy.
“Let her out!” Jerry shouted. “More! More! Okay ... hold her there!” Sandy felt some of the pull lessen as he allowed the sail to swing farther out over the side. “Good,” Jerry said. “Now take the tiller—hold everything as it is—while I free the jenny and trim it properly.”
Sandy, the mainsheet wound tightly about his right hand, took the tiller in his left, while Jerry went forward to do his job. He was burning with eagerness to look back to see how their maneuver had affected Jones, but he didn’t dare. He had too much to think about to take his eyes away even for a second from his own work of sailing. This was the first time he had handled both the tiller and mainsheet and it was really the first time he had actually handled the boat. There was a new sense of command now and of real control. The feel of the boat was complete. It almost seemed alive. His hands told him how a change of rudder position worked a change on the sail, or how a shift of the mainsail, a few inches in or out, affected the pull on the helm.
In a few minutes, Jerry was back in the cockpit, trimming the genoa sheet and setting the sail in its best shape ahead of and overlapping the mainsail. When all was made fast, he took the tiller from Sandy once more, and the boys were at last free to look back.
What they saw was not encouraging. As they had expected, the change of course had increased the distance between them and Jones, but the distance was not great enough to take them out of sight. A few minutes of looking revealed that they were not likely to outdistance Jones on this tack any more than they had on the downwind run.
“How come we can’t beat him?” Sandy asked. “He surely hasn’t had time to get his spinnaker down and his genoa up, has he?”
“He didn’t have to,” Jerry answered. “He’s using his spinnaker now as if it were a genoa. It’s a good stunt. What he did was to bring the spinnaker pole forward and lash it to the deck, so that it made a kind of bowsprit. Then he sheeted the sail flat. It makes a powerful sail that way.”
“What if he wants to go on the opposite tack?” Sandy asked. “How can he put about?”