On the wall in my office is an iconic photo of legendary Swedish sailor Magnus Olsson sailing aboard the infamous Whitbread Maxi DRUM in the Southern Ocean, his arms hoisted skyward, his smile ecstatic, the boat careering down a wave at 20-plus knots with an enormous arc of spray flying off the bow wave. The photo, by Rick Tomlinson, himself a legendary Whitbread sailor and one of the OG onboard reporters, is to me the perfect expression of the pure joy that can only be felt on a boat at sea sailing fast. The photo reminds me why I love sailing.
But look closer and you’ll notice a lot of technical details to the way the crew has the boat set up: the old-school vang strap looped over the boom and lashed to the rail; the high-clewed yankee poled out to windward; the mainsheet traveler set all the way to leeward to move the sheet out of the cockpit, making access to the helm that much simpler for the crew. And most obvious of all, the deep reef in the mainsail, tied aft around the boom and lashed forward at the tack just above the gooseneck. DRUM’s lap around the world in the Whitbread was before the days of the planing monohulls that seem never to need to reef and are always sailing on a close reach. DRUM, while huge even by modern boat standards, is a displacement boat and far more similar to the average cruising boats we sail. In this picture she’s sailing on a dead run, wing-on-wing, just as we would on a tradewind passage in the tropics.
I often focus on writing about offshore sailing, as that’s my primary domain, but learning how to reef is an essential skill for all sailors, no matter where you sail. The adage, “If you’re thinking about reefing, it’s already too late” remains relevant. But not all reefing systems are created equal. And not all circumstances call for the same sails to be reefed in the same order.
WHAT SAILS TO REEF?
Regardless of how you reef your sails—whether slab reefing, roller furling mast/boom, old-school hank-on headsails—you must
