Solo Sailing Drills: Tacks, Starts, Roundings and More

The short version

Why drill: A race gives you a dozen tacks and a few roundings, spread over an hour and mixed up with everything else. A drill gives you twenty of one thing in ten minutes, so you can feel the difference between a good one and a bad one.
What to drill: Tacks, gybes, mark roundings, accelerations, holding station, speed runs and timed runs to a line. All of them work on your own, with two marks or none.
How: One thing per session, short reps with rest between, and a way to tell good reps from bad: a coach, a partner boat or a recording.
The trap: Doing lots of reps without checking any of them. Twenty bad tacks make you better at bad tacks.

Setting up a practice session

You don't need a coach boat or a fleet. You need some open water, a plan, and ideally two marks: anything you can round, such as a mooring, a club buoy or a small anchored float of your own. Set them a few hundred metres apart, one roughly upwind of the other, and you have a practice course.

Pick one thing. A session on tacks is a session on tacks. You can add one other drill as a change of pace, but not five.
Short reps, then rest. Ten tacks with a minute's straight sailing between them beats forty back to back. You get back to full speed between reps, which is the speed you'll be tacking from in a race.
Know what good looks like before you start, and check each rep against it. That's the difference between practice and just sailing about.
Stop before you're tired. Reps done exhausted teach bad habits. Forty-five minutes of focused drilling is plenty for most club sailors.

Two marks and a short line are enough for every drill in this guide.

Tacks and gybes

Tacks

Sail upwind at full speed, tack, settle, get back to full speed, and tack again. Ten to twenty per set. A tack costs more than most sailors think: measured on Sail Tactician's own race recordings (a small sample), a typical tack loses about 45% of boat speed at its slowest point, measured from the moment the bow crosses head to wind. That's normal; what you're working on is how far the speed drops and how quickly it comes back.

On each rep, check three things:

Entry: were you at full speed before you started the turn?
Exit angle: did you come out on your close-hauled course, or turn too far (wide, then head up) or not far enough (pinched: sailing too close to the wind, sails soft, boat slow)?
Recovery: how long until you were back to full speed?

For the technique itself, see how to tack faster.

Gybes

The same drill downwind. Bear away to dead downwind, gybe with the boom under control, and come up only to your downwind angle on the new gybe. The common fault is coming out too high, which feels safer and costs distance. In a breeze, start with a few in lighter patches before doing them in the gusts. See how to gybe.

Roll tacks and roll gybes

In a dinghy, practice them as their own drill. A roll tack sails the same course as a plain tack; the difference is entirely what the crew's weight does, heeling the boat to leeward going in and rolling it hard to windward through the turn. Light air is where they pay most, and where you'll feel the difference fastest.

Mark roundings

Sail round the course: up, round the windward mark, down, round the leeward mark, and repeat. Or set one mark and sail figure-eights round it so each lap gives you two roundings. Work on the shape: wide in, tight out. Start the turn early from a wide approach, carve in so you pass close to the mark, and exit already on the new course. The fault to watch for is turning in too early and too tight, which forces a wide, slow exit just when you want to be accelerating. See how to round a mark.

Add sail handling once the turn is consistent: the spinnaker drop before a leeward rounding, the hoist after a windward one. The rounding isn't finished until you're up to speed on the new leg.

Start skills: hold station, accelerate, time a run

Starts are where club racers lose the most, and they're easy to practice alone with two buoys or even a single mark.

Hold station. Sit near your line with the sails luffing and keep the boat in one place for thirty seconds to a minute, using small rudder movements and a little sail to stop yourself drifting. Watch a fixed reference to judge drift, not just feel. The fault: trimming in "just a bit" and creeping forward the whole time.
Accelerate. From near-stopped, bear away slightly to get flow over the sails, sheet in progressively as the boat picks up speed, and only then head up to close-hauled. Time how long it takes. Sheeting hard from a standstill stalls the sails and the boat goes nowhere.
Timed runs. Pick a spot back from your line, start a countdown, and try to cross at full speed as it reaches zero. Vary the distance and the time, and note when you were early (and had to slow down) or late. This is the skill behind a good start: knowing how long your boat takes to get there in today's breeze.

Speed runs and angle holds

Not every drill is a maneuver. Two that build boat speed:

Speed run. Sail a straight line on one heading for a few minutes and change one thing at a time: outhaul, vang, jib lead, heel, where crew sit. Keep the steering small; big rudder movements cost more speed than any puff gives back. Note what you changed and what happened to your speed.
Upwind angle hold. Hold your best upwind angle for three minutes: not as high as the boat will point and not as low as it'll foot, but the mix that gets you upwind fastest. If speed bleeds off, bear away a few degrees; if you're fast but low, head up gradually. A downwind version does the same for the run.

With a second boat

A partner makes every drill better, because the other boat is a measuring stick.

Line-ups. Sail side by side, a few boat lengths apart, on the same tack for two or three minutes. Whoever gains is doing something better; swap one setting and go again.
Follow the leader. One boat leads and tacks or gybes whenever it likes; the other follows and copies. It trains reacting quickly and tacking on cue.
Two-boat starts. Set a short line and start against each other on a countdown. Take turns at the favored end.
Rules practice. Close crossings at slow speed are the safest way to learn how port-starboard and windward-leeward feel from the boat.

Doing it with Sail Tactician

Sail Tactician for this skill

On the water: A workout is a list of drills, each with a target (Tacks × 10, an upwind angle hold for three minutes) and an optional rest. It runs on iPhone or Apple Watch, or the watch alone. The screen shows one word at a time and speaks it: TACK, SETTLE while it scores the turn, then GOOD or the one thing to fix: HEAD UP if you turned past your angle, BEAR AWAY if you came out too close to the wind, SMOOTHER if the turn lost too much speed, SPEED UP if you were slow to get going again.
After the session: The session keeps every rep. Tap any drill's name to open its guide: what the maneuver is, the steps, what a good rep looks like, the common fault, and a History tab with your own reps across every session. After a race, the app recommends a workout (such as Tacking Clinic or Gybe Day) when your tacks or gybes show a pattern a drill can fix.
Practice: Tacks, roll tacks and gybes are detected and scored for speed loss, exit angle and recovery; once you've done four, each is judged against your own usual turn. A Race Start drill runs a countdown each rep and scores you at zero (it needs a start line). Hold Station records how far you drift. The upwind and downwind VMG holds (VMG is your speed toward the wind, or away from it on a run) cue HEAD UP and BEAR AWAY and give a share of time on target. Penalty turns, accelerations and capsize recovery are counted with a +1 tap; mark roundings are scored automatically when the session has a windward mark set, and counted with +1 otherwise.

Training is in beta: reps are spotted from your GPS course, so the app can miss or miscount one. Trust the trend across a session more than any single rep.

The coach screen mid-drill: one call, and a strip with a segment for each rep.

Questions

How can I practice sailing on my own?

Set two marks a few hundred metres apart and pick one skill per session: tacks, gybes, roundings, holding station, accelerating or timed runs to a line. Do short sets with rest between and check each rep against what good looks like.

How many tacks should I practice?

Ten to twenty per set, with a minute or so of straight sailing between them so you start each one from full speed. Quality matters more than the count.

What's the best drill for better starts?

Timed runs to a line: start a countdown from a fixed distance back and try to cross at full speed at zero. Pair it with holding station and acceleration practice.

Do I need a coach to improve?

A coach helps, but most of what one gives you is feedback on each rep. A partner boat, a recording you review afterwards, or an app that scores each maneuver can do much of that.

Sources

Drill descriptions adapted from Sail Tactician's in-app training guide. Tack speed loss measured on Sail Tactician's own race recordings, a small sample. App behavior from the in-app User Guide, version 3.2. Practice-session structure and two-boat drills are standard club-racing practice.

What changed

2026-10-16First published.

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