Tacking—a maneuver used to sail a boat against the wind, changing direction in a zig-zag fashion—is one of the most difficult but necessary sailing maneuvers. While tacking is common, the movement of ...

With the season just beginning for many sailors, I thought it might be a good time to get back to the basics. In sailboat racing there are four fundamentals you must master: tacking, jibing, spinnaker ...

One of the problems of using GPS chartplotters on a sailboat is that it is extremely difficult to calculate accurate arrival times given the amount of tacking often involved. Now there's a ...

Learn the proper lingo before you watch your next race.

I ask because our tactician is having a noticeably hard time figuring out what to do. “Uh … no,” our tactician responds. “OK,” I say. “Let’s tack, then we can sort it out.” It’s not that he is doing ...

The Courant Institute's Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, above at Central Park's Conservatory Water, and the University of Michigan's Silas Alben studied how sails behave during a wide range of tacking ...