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When sailing a dinghy, the boat is initially kept in balance by the weight of the crew. If this is not enough to prevent the dinghy from heeling in strong or gusty winds, the balance must be regulated using the sheet and tiller. This film shows how sailors can practice this in a variety of fun ways, starting with light winds. If you master it, you will also be safer. Regulating balance with the sheet is used on all courses with a broad wind. Regulating balance with the tiller is used when sailing close to the wind. Because if you let out the sheet here, you lose height. Summary: To regulate balance with the sheet, the following are shown: heeling the dinghy to leeward, righting it again, and heeling to windward, each time using only the mainsheet. In order to explore the effect of this alone, the seating positions of the sailors and the direction of travel remain fixed. Even when regulating balance with the tiller, two of the three control elements remain fixed, this time the sitting positions of the sailors and both sheets. This allows the effect of the tiller alone to be explored well. The fixed sitting position of the sailors here means that when the boat heels, they do not try to keep their upper bodies upright against the heeling movement of the boat, but rather follow it. This is also shown in the film. In order to explore the scope and limits of such steering actions, the dinghy is repeatedly steered so high into the wind that one or both sailors are lowered to the water or even into the water. They are then raised again with the tiller. Depending on the wind strength, but also for his own training purposes, the helmsman steers the dinghy from different seats: on the tank and down in the boat, to windward and to leeward. Finally, the film also gives tips on how to influence the heeling force of the boat when sailing a dinghy so that practice is possible in a larger range of wind strengths. © Hamburg, 2017 Authors: Gerhard Müller, formerly Department of Sports Science, University of Hamburg. Contact: [email protected] Gisela Müller-Plath, Department of Methodology and Maritime Psychology, Technical University of Berlin. Contact: [email protected] Photographs by Gerhard Müller at the University of Hamburg 1992 – 2007 and at the Ecole Nationale de Voile (ENV) in Quiberon, France.