Sailing Technical Papers

I got involved in the technical aspect of sailing because I started racing. Reading the sailing books and magazines, I began to realize that most of what was written about the aerodynamics of sails was wrong, or certainly very misleading.

The explanations for how lift is generated were based on popular myths. The description of the interactions between a jib and mainsail, the "slot effect", did not make much aerodynamic sense.

From the beginning I was interested in racing. In Southern California the competition was rather fierce with all of the sailmakers and boat building people out on the race course every weekend. Maybe if I learned how sails really worked, this would help me on the race course?

I was soon launched on a quest to discover how our sails really worked. Over the years this resulted in a number of technical sailing papers and magazine articles. The technical sailing papers are archived in this section of my web site. My magazine articles can be reached from my Home page.

The files are all in PDF format and are rather large, so you may need a high speed connection to download them.