Q&A for How to Sail a Boat

The tiller is a short pole or a bar that is connected to the rudder or rudders to steer.

You can learn to sail single and small-capacity boats in a couple days. If you have someone experienced to teach you, the process goes rather quickly. It seems like there's a lot to remember, but it's a lot about feeling the wind and trial-and-error until you get moving. If you practice on a fairly calm day on a lake where you won't get huge waves, you'll be skippering your friends around in no time.

When you want to go fast, try to angle the boat to pick up as much wind as possible. If you want to slow down, reef the sails.

Absolutely.

When tacking, you would take the main sheets and the tiller and switch hands behind your back while moving from one side of the boat to the other. Although this may sound complicated, practice will help you develop this skill.

On a well-found sailboat, the fastest point-of-sail is a beam reach.

That depends on the boat. For a dinghy with a centerboard (most small sail boats fall into this category), it will not pop back up. You will need to go through the righting procedure to get the boat sailing again. Sailboats with a fixed keel (larger monohull boats usually over 20 feet), are designed to right themselves. They have a significant amount of weight in the keel that works as a lever to right the boat. In some conditions, like loss of the keel or downflooding, the boat might not right itself. Multi-hull sailboats (catamarans, trimarans) do not right themselves.

Eighteen is the generally-accepted age around the world. However, so long as you know what you are doing, you are allowed to sail on private waters without certification.

Difficult for non-experienced sailors. You'll need to learn orientation, seamanship, and maritime law for when you're outside of sovereign waters. Be sure to plan in advance, and tell other people when you expect to arrive and return.

The names are: Kicker pulls the boom and therefore the outside edge of the sail down; downhaul pulls the front of the sail down; outhaul pulls the sail horizontally along the boom; jib sheets pull the jib in main sheet pulls the main in; the spinnaker halyard hoists the spinnaker; the main halyard hoists the main sail; and the jib halyard hoists the jib.

A toe rail is a raised edge of the deck, wooden or metal, running the circumference of the deck. It may have many small perforations where a preventer could be attached. A preventer is used to prevent an accidental jibe when running downwind; it is set up between the toe rail and a fitting on the underside of the boom.