ILCA Sailing Tips: How to Steer in Waves
Good wave steering turns hiking effort into speed by keeping the bow connected to the water and resetting angle before the splashdown stall.
Fitness can limit upwind boatspeed when the breeze is up. Consistent hiking on windy days can feel unsustainable. While hiking is paramount to upwind speed, there is a lot of technique that can help you go faster and make hiking less painful.
Fast ILCA sailors who are not exceptionally fit are usually doing other things well: steering more, setting up the sail for about five degrees of weather helm with a wide enough groove, handling gusts and lulls well, and using energy efficiently.
Steering
“Up the face and down the back” is the saying. It sounds simple, but good dinghy helming in waves is an art that is often overlooked. At ISA, we spend a lot of time analyzing and correcting steering accuracy, quantity, and rhythm. It is not learned overnight.
There are prerequisites: set up a balanced boat with not too much weather helm, set the sail with enough groove to steer to, be the correct weight for your rig and conditions, know where close-hauled is, and be able to sail it consistently.
Why steer?
Coaches often say not to use the rudder and to use sails and body to steer. But in waves or chop large enough to slow the boat, and when there is enough time between waves to steer well, we do want to steer. Smashing into a wave decreases speed and starts a chain reaction that hurts performance.
We need to pull the tiller up at the top of the wave to keep the bow in contact with the wave. Depending on wave size, this may be a small or large pull, sometimes with the tiller crossing past the outside of the cockpit when viewed from astern.
The key timing
From the top, you stay in contact with the water instead of flying off the ramp, maintaining a long waterline. This steer down should increase your slight weather helm and want to bring the boat back up. Almost as soon as you pull, it is time to push back.
Aim to have the tiller at centerline, or crossing centerline, when the bow splashes down at the bottom of the wave. This is crucial. If you keep pulling, you create a big stall there and go sideways quickly. You also often get so low in the groove that you become overpowered.
At splashdown, you have reset your angle to optimum for power and pointing and are on the way back up the next wave or into a flat spot. Usually, if the tiller is already centerline at the splash, you do not need to head up as much as you bore away. The weather helm already brought you back on angle.
Practice
This is a starting point. Try it and see how it feels. Watch tiller and rudder motions of champions and try to replicate the rhythm. Get a friend to video you and watch yourself.
