Navigator Tacking angles

On the JWBuilders forum, Robert asked a very good question about tacking angles.  More specifically, do the 120 degree tacking angles that he measured with his compass coincide with those experienced by other Navigator yawl owners.

Ive often wondered the same thing.  It is widely accepted that yawls do not point quite as high as sloops, but make up for it on other points of sail.  So I uploaded the tracks stored in my Garmin GPS to have a closer look.

Looking at the tracks I quickly realized that I spend very little time tacking upwind.  This time of year the wind tends to come from the N or NW.  When I have a Northerly, I like to take a lap around Hat Island.  When I have a Northwesterly, I enjoy a reach down to Mukilteo and back rather than sail upwind to Hat.

But on closer inspection, I did find some good examples of Ellie tacking.  Here were tacking North inside  Jetty Island back to the boat ramp.  The wind is from the NNW.
 

 And heres a bit of tacking into a Northwesterly.

And finally, tacking into a Northerly, while fighting a little bit of counter current from the outgoing tide.

I dont know what the tacking angles are in these examples.  Ill let you be the judge.  I know that if I try to pinch Ellie any tighter than the angles you see, her speed drops off dramatically.

I hope this helps answer your question Rob. Comments are always greatly appreciated.

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Angles and Precision

I have experience in the housebuilding, construction world.  I used to joke with my workers when theyd talk about measurement in sixteenths.  "Sixteenths?  I didnt know they made fractions smaller than eighths."  And in homebuilding, unless you are a finish carpenter, there is seldom need to take such fine measurements.

Not so much in building a boat.  I realized early that a sixteenth here and a sixteenth there soon adds up to errors in real inches.  The tolerances are small because it all has to fit together and somehow like voodoo, keep water out.  My usual tolerances are not good enough because, it turns out, that recent science has shown that water molecules are smaller than an eighth inch.

The angles of the end cuts were not specified in the plans.  In fact, I had to resurrect my long dormant high school geometry knowledge in order to calculate the angles.  Working with the plans a bit, I got the length and the height of the triangle that would be the end of the boat.

Out comes the trigonometry reference.  Looking at it and with some research on the interwebs, I realized there was a magic word I remember being thrown about in high school trig that I never did decipher: SOHCAHTOA.  This time around it made sense.  Of course!  Sine, cosine, and tangent.  Opposite, adjacent, and hypotenuse. So I had the opposite and adjacent sides (TOA!), and so used tangent to calculate the angle.  Fucking magic!

The angle was so frustratingly close to 45 degrees that it made everything just a little bit more complicated.  43.5 degrees.  Looking at a particular angle drawn on a board, it wasnt easy to visualize whether the angle (or its complement) were correct for that cut.  Yet, the 3 degrees difference between the two was maddeningly significant.

In fact, after all that work, while I managed to cut the long lateral pieces at the right angle (43.5 degrees, FYI), I managed to cut every end piece with the wrong angle (it should have been the complement at 46.5 degrees).

As I predicted, this tiny 3 degree error would make our lives slightly crazy as every stringer came together with a frustrating little gap or overhang at the ends.  Grrr.

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