Kevin in fine form. Note how the Lasers heel their boats to windward on the run to keep the Centre of Effort directly aligned with the boat's Centre of Resistance. This avoids weather helm. To understand this, lay a small ruler on a table and then put the fingers of one hand on one side of the ruler and hold them steady. These fingers can now represent the force of the water resisting the hull's forward progress. Meanwhile the sail is pushing in the opposite direction, so use the fingers of your other hand to push against the ruler from the other side. If you place the sail force fingers off to one side or the other of the resistance fingers, the ruler will rotate, but if you line up the two sets of fingers exactly opposite each other, the ruler won't swivel. If you sail a one-sail boat such as a Laser dead flat on a run, the sail push will be somewhere off to leeward of the hull and its resistance - and the boat will want to turn to windward (weather helm), which is why the boat above is heeled so that the sail force moves to an area directly above the hull resistance. Your rudder tells you how much heel you need: when the weather helm disappears, you're heeled enough.

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A close battle for Wayfarer 2nd between Jens and Roger (7700). Both have their poles a bit far aft. If you compare with the inset, you can see that the spi foot on 7663 and 7700 is too close to the forestay/jib combination. This, however, is hard to see from inside the boat. What we do on SHADES is to make sure that the whole spi is not falling off to leeward of the pole end as it is here on 7663 and 7700: note how our spi (inset) starts out curving a bit to windward of the pole end such that the foot and the luff make an angle of more than 90° to each other. As the pole comes too far aft, that corner of the spi begins to looked stretched, i.e. trends towards an angle of less than 90°.

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