Interesting question hope some of the racers weigh in here.

We find that we can sail 40 degrees off the wind quite well and can sneak up close to 30 if the wind is strong enough and not shifting around a lot, but at that we feel the loss of speed and leeway increase isn't worth it. Those are degrees on the old Autohelm instruments so that might be out.

I sheet the genoa in as tight as it will go without it being on the spreaders, so it is completely inside the lifelines. The genoa car is set about 5 holes up from the back of the track, though have had it right to the back and it didn't seem to make much difference. The traveller we pull upwind about halfway between center and the end of the track, if we don't do that the front edge of the main stalls. The main sheet is as tight as I can pull it without using a winch. We don't have a boom vang.

I have to say I am no racer nor do I profess do know much about sail trim. This was taught to me by an in-law who is a decent racer. It made a huge difference in our ability to go to windward but we're no threat to get anywhere faster than anyone else. I should also say that our main appears to be original but is still in not bad shape while the 150 genoa is a Hood, age unknown but it is not great looks blown out to me and we intend to replace it in the future.

Don't forget the outhaul and cunningham.

Actually, our experience has been that many, many other boats point higher than ours do. If you're racing PHRF that's what you'll find.

We also race one-design and lotsa of the other C34s in our gang point higher than we do, too.

Their tricks are not well documented, 'cuz they don't want to give away any secrets, not hard to understand. That's why they have written lots of books about how to race, but you won't see much on websites.:cool:

We started out with an old GPS (no maps, just data) and worked our VMG (no, that GPS didn't give it to us, we had to figure out that when our speed to the mark was zero, we had hit the layline! - of course, dealing with currents can mess that up big time).

I would suggest this: keep your head INSIDE your boat for a change and stop watching the other guys, then get the best VMG out of YOUR boat, first. Then worry about the other guys.

All the rest comes with learning sail trim on your boat. There are go fast ideas like Garhauer's adjustable fairleads, and using both inside and outside tracks with two jib sheets on each side, blah, blah, blah. The list is endless.

Good luck, it took us years to start coming out in the upper bracket of our group. Stay with it, it will come.

I too would love to know the secret! I've been frustrated so many times when our destination is directly to windward... We'll be sailing close hauled at 35 degrees on the wind instrument, but when we tack we go through 120 degrees!
We can pinch to 30 degrees all right, but that's [I]apparent wind[/I]. Also there's more slippage to count on which seems to make the angle more like 50 degrees from true wind. Additionally, as most of our sailing is done shorthanded on autopilot, we have to allow an extra 5 to 10 degrees as the autopilot wanders a bit and you can wind up luffing or hove to before you know it! :(
So on the GPS our usual best effort seems to be 55 to 60 degrees off the true wind...

Yes, apparent wind. I should have said that earlier.

Dan,
A few other thoughts/hints. Genoa: just enough halyard tension to take the horizontal wrinkles out of the luff. Too much halyard will create vertical wrinkles. Not good. Head up slightly to see which tell-tale breaks first. If the top one does, move the genoa car forward. If the bottom one does, move the car aft. You want all tell-tales breaking at the same time. Every genoa is slightly different (even OEM sails), so you can't use someone else's track settings. Mark the spreaders with a strip of tape around them exactly 1' from the tips. Gives you a good frame of reference. Main: in medium air, play with the traveler and mainsheet to get the boom on the centerline of the boat, and the back half of he second batten parallel to the boom. The top tell-tale should occasionally be "hiding" (wrapping around to the leeward side of the sail). In very light air, you want a very flat sail (more halyard, more outhaul). Medium air you want a fuller sail (less halyard and less outhaul). Heavy air, you want a flat sail again (including the cunningham if you have one). Vang is not used until you are off the wind. I'm not a pro trimmer, but these ideas have helped me in the Wednesday night beercan races. You might want to also pose this question to the email list server. Some of those guys are very knowledgeable racers.

Not a racer, either, but I learned that pointing higher as gauged by boat heading is not as important as VMG. I can point higher by pinching but lose speed forward as well as increase leeway so much that it is counter-productive.

One thing no one mentioned is headstay sag. Many C36s don't have backstay adjusters and the mast is not designed to be bent easily, but too much headstay sag can definitely hurt, too.

Good luck with your mission.

I too am not a racer and find the most effective way of pointing very high is by unfurling my M25XP.

Duane has it right, the best improvement to pointing ability I have made was to get rid of as much forestay sag as possible. Be careful, it takes alot of tension on the backstay to do this.

I have forever tightened my backstay as tight as I could get it. This was done to get a small aft bend in the mast. Of course to sail into the wind you will need to bring your genoa in as close to the inside (cabin) as possible while paying attention to the pull down and aft to prevent wrinkles in the sail. When I am sailing as close as possible I find the genoa sheets tight enough one might be able to strum a tune. Of course keeping all the tails streaming aft is crucial to trim and helsmanship. Fortunately GWTW seems to be pretty well balanced so it is not difficult to keep her at the same attitude.
I have played with the main as well and have moved it with the traveler just beyond center and again tightened the mainsheet to its fullest to keep the main flat. Over the years this has worked reasonbly well for me while pointing into the wind. I have thoght at times that I point even closer than 30 degrees and have made very good headway. I have never had a wind meter and have just used teltales and a wind indicator at the top of the mast. I too have never raced this boat in a formal race but have arrived many times at a destination sooner than some so called racing boats.....I have no shame! Ergo Gone With The Wind

Tightening the headstay typically helps, although this ultimately depends on the cut of your genoa and the strength of the breeze. Regardless of cut, the genoa will become flatter in the front half by running a tighter headstay, which in many cases will help pointing.

Next control is the genoa halyard. This one is tricky. A very tight genoa halyard will make the sail flatter overall and will move draft forward in the sail. Ultimately it can give you a 'knuckle' in the sail up front. Used within reason this will give you a slightly LOWER pointing angle but a "wider groove" that will be easier to steer to. It is also possible to 'stall' the sail by pulling the halyard too tight.

A loose genoa halyard does the opposite, adding draft and moving it back. An extreme example is often seen in J/24's where they sail with inches of slack in the genoa halyard. This actually makes the entry, the very front part of the sail, very flat and allows high pointing BUT makes the "groove" very narrow and most helmsmen can't steer to the telltales in this situation. It is particularly hard to use this tool on the CAtalina as it is not the most responsive boat.

Working our way aft we come to the genoa sheet leads. Common wisdom says that you want to adjust these so that the sail trims out evenly from top to bottom. Ultimately this is a rather 2-dimensional view of a 3 dimensional problem.

As it relates the Catalina 36, here are my thoughts on Genoa lead.

1. The genoa tracks are too far outboard (away from centerline) for any kind of decent upwind sailing.
2. The genoa tracks on my early (1983) boat do not go far enough aft to trim a 150% genoa properly.
3. Most of us are using "not new" sails and most of them are made from dacron. They are almost all too full, and many have a heavy UV leech cover.

Solutions:

1. On my boat, I added inhaulers such as those seen on Farr 40, Mumm 30, 1D35, and other boats. They consist of a padeye on the cabintop, a few inches in from the edge and all the way aft, with a piece of single braid dyneema running through the base of a block, and to the outboard end of the traveller. The block is allowed to float on the dyneema, it can slide fore and aft as it likes. The jib sheet goes from the clew of the sail, to this block, and then to the jib car on deck, and to the winch. This pulls the jib sheet in as if the jib track were on the cabintop. This got me 5 degrees of upwind point. *doing all this requires removing the side panels of the dodger when racing*

2. Once the inhaulers were in place, the only purpose of the jib cars is to control fore-aft movement, it doesn't matter how far in or outboard they are. So I moved them from the inboard track to the toerail, which runs all the way aft. I still intend to extend the track aft but it doesn't really matter.

Note for 1+2: the best solution I can think of here may actually be to add a new track either on the cabintop or on the coaming in front of the primary winch, but this could have implications for cruising.

3. Older and/or fuller sails will tend to shut down the leech more quickly when trimmed on. A genoa with UV cover will stretch less in the leech then elsewhere, also encouraging the leech to shut down. By this I mean that the leech will 'cup' or 'close' much like putting the flaps down on the back of an airplane wing. This is slow. In all cases the solution is to slide the jib lead aft (or up, say on to the cabin top!) to decrease the leech tension. Ultimately I look to have the foot of my genoa stretched tight around the shrouds in almost all conditions, and to have at least 6" to 12" of space between the spreader tip and the leech of the sail. This will naturally force you to run some twist in the sail, ie. the top inside telltale will break first. This makes the sail easier to steer to and should help avoid the 'closed leech' which is not fast.

Lastly for pointing, don't forget that the main has a lot to do with pointing also. The traveller on my boat is marked in 1" increments for a foot either side of centerline. I usually carry it about 2" to weather in wind up to around 14 knots. Sheet on the main until the top batten is parallel with the boom as a starting point and try to get the top leech tell tale flying just intermittently.

Then it is all up to the helm. You must foot out of tacks to build the speed up to the speed on the polar charts, and only then put the bow up the last 10 degrees or so.

Do all of this, and get the best genoa your money will buy, and unfortunately you will likely still point a good 5 degrees or more lower than most C&C/Peterson/etc. type boats that were designed for this. But once it blows about 12 knots you will start to even up on VMG just by going faster and as the wind gets stronger things will start to look up. On Nimue we always assume that if we are side by side with anyone at the weather mark we probably have them beat!

[QUOTE=Steve Frost;9756]I too am not a racer and find the most effective way of pointing very high is by unfurling my M25XP.[/QUOTE]

You mean I didn't invent that technique?:p

Mike

Jason, wow, ton of info there. About #3, I have noticed closing of the leech on our genoa, it does that cupping extremely and I think that's why we have to pull the traveller up about a foot to stop the front edge of the main from stalling. I suspected that was a really bad thing but now I know. At some point in time a new genoa is in our future and we do need UV protection, so how does one get that without affecting the sail shape?

Also regarding sheeting in the genoa tight, our genoa hits the shrouds long before the foot is anywhere near the shrouds, in light air by the time it is inboard of the lifelines you have to start looking up as it will be close. It has actually been damaged and repaired in that area at least once. Just wondering how you can get it so tight at the bottom and still have space at the shrouds. Is that due to the inhaulers you have installed?

Thanks for the detailed info.

Bud,

The inhaulers help, but I actually don't use them with my heavy cruising jib (with the subrella leech). I just keep moving the jib cars back until it goes away. My cruising jib is about a 135% with a fairly high clew. The inboard tracks don't go nearly far enough back, I think I have finally found the 'sweet spot' for that sail with the cars on the toe rail directly beside the primary winches. This lets me get the foot more or less flat in 6 knots of breeze. Below that you are kind of screwed with most cruising sails anyways. If you are hitting the shrouds up high with the foot still rounded and outside the lifelines the car is definitely too far forward.

I have been trying this and it works well..the outside rail beside the winch is far enough back but conflicts a bit with the lifelines.I can see where adding a short strip of track behind and inboard of the existing genoa track or ahead of the winch on the coaming would be the answer..thanks Jason