"The wind in your face!"

Sailing LessonsSailing began many thousands of years ago, when some innovative primitive held up a skin to catch the wind and found that he could escape in this way the labour of paddling whenever the wind was fair.

When the wind was not fair he accepted that he still had to paddle. As the centuries rolled by, sail-powered ships were developed for fishing, for trade, and for military might. The skin held up to catch the wind was replaced by woven sails. These ships were reasonably efficient for downwind and crosswind sailing but dreadfully slow when they had to sail against the wind. Because they had to sail in narrow waterways where they had no option but to sail against the wind for much of the time, smaller boats of different kinds appeared : the Arab dhows of the Red Sea and the Bristol Channel cutters in England were the first boats to display good windward sailing ability.