![]() ![]() Get Sally in the groove – an easy matter, as she’s better at steering herself than the helmsman just peg her tiller and put the kettle on – and she will set her perky nose to the horizon and go. Simon once told me that it is largely the hull that defines how close to the wind a boat can sail, so there’s no point in cutting sails that do not match that angle. Crucially, they’re powerful enough to drive her hull (just shy of 5 tons) at the angle it prefers to assume to the wind. ![]() Sally’s sails – Simon Richardson on the Hamble knew his stuff after cutting his teeth, and sails, on 12-Ms in Newport Rhode Island in the old America’s Cup days – are cut to suit her hull’s ability upwind. Sally knows her limits, for sure try and push her upwind closer than she wants, or her sails permit, and she sulks. Let no one tell you that old long-keeled yachts are slow, or don’t point worth a damn. ![]() She is 25ft and a bit long, 78 years old, and last summer managed to clock 8.7 knots on the chartplotter she had for a 75th birthday present three years before. Of what later became the Vertue class, Jack Laurent Giles’s best known design. Long-keeled Sally, or Sally II, is an altogether different creature, the second ![]() On a flighty racing boat the vang is used, among other things, to control twist and keep the forces acting on the fin keel in balance. It was a legacy of “Vang on!”, a call we used to hear all too often on those interminable triangles to nowhere which comprised RORC racing in the 1980s. T here was a time when, possibly as a legacy of dinghy sailing and some youthful offshore racing, I would strap Sally’s long, heavy wooden boom down and attempt to get it as close to parallel with her waterline as I could, without ripping the toerail from its fastenings. To buy your copy or to subscribe to CB, click here. Columnist Adrian Morgan on sailing without a vang in his Vertue-class sloop Sally. ![]()
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