Brewer, here, folks. No, I’m not going to get completely nautical on you, now, but I do like to sail occasionally, and there’s a common misconception about that particular pastime that’s always bothered me, and I’d like to talk about it.
Lots of people take sailing classes at the YMCA, but I guess everyone now just calls it the Y. Sailing the small boats is not too awfully difficult, unless you start getting wind speeds exceeding twenty miles per hour, and then it gets tricky unless you know what you’re doing. But it has always amazed me how people could successfully complete their sailing course and come away knowing hardly anything about how the boat functioned.
The perfect example of this is the daggerboard. Most of these small boats have one. In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s a board around four feet long, usually plywood, that’s had its edges rounded or pointed. It goes down through a slot in the center of the boat, and when you’re going straight forward, it cuts through the water like a knife. You can position this board at various depths into the water by pushing it down or pulling up on a rope attached to the top. There’s usually enough friction for it to stay where you put it.
Now, the purpose of this board is the subject of this rant, or, I should say, the misinterpretation of the purpose of this board. I’ve seen would-be sailors push the board down when the boat starts to heel, or tilt to one side, even when the boat is not really going anywhere, as if the board would somehow stabilize, or right, the boat. It will not. It will not prevent your boat, which may be sitting still in the water, from capsizing, or turning over, when a gust of wind comes up. It won’t even do that when the boat is moving forward at a good clip. So, when your overweight partner shifts to one side of the boat and the boat starts to go over, pushing down the daggerboard shouldn’t be high on your list of emergency procedures to try.
Here’s what it does do. When the wind is coming from any direction except dead ahead (in front) or dead astern (in back), if you didn’t have the daggerboard, the boat would, for the most part, just run ahead of the wind. What I mean by that is that the boat would just get blown willy-nilly wherever the wind will take it. The daggerboard acts like an airplane wing that works in the water instead of in the air. It limits leeway, which means it helps to prevent the wind from just blowing the boat to one side. This is the same thing a keel does on a larger boat. Since the wind now can’t just blow your boat off to the side, all the force generated by the wind has to do something, so it will either move your boat forward, or it will capsize it. That part is up to you, depending on how you trim your sails and your boat, and how you handle the tiller.
So, next time you see someone jerking a daggerboard up and down to try to stabilize a boat, smile and wave.
