heave to in a catamaran

How to Heave To On A Sailboat

If you’re wondering how to heave to on your sailboat, and why you might want to, then you’re reading the right article!

Heaving to is an important safety technique that every sailor should know, and practice regularly. But do you know how to heave to, and under what conditions might need to use this manoeuvre?

In this article we take a deep dive into the practice of heaving to – exploring how to enter a hove-to state on different kinds of sailing vessels, when and why to use this technique, and taking a look at some historical examples of instances where heaving to has saved lives.

You can trust us to tell you everything you need to know about the heave-to manoeuvre, because we are seasoned sailors with RYA-accredited qualifications and thousands and thousands of miles under the keel, hard-won in every sea state imaginable. We have also heaved to quite a few times ourselves!

Before we get into the mechanics of how to heave to, let’s take a quick look at what this technique is and aims to achieve.

What is heaving to, why heave to in sailing, how does heaving to work, how to heave to in a sailboat, how to heave to in a sloop.

How to heave to in a cutter
How to heave to in a ketch

How to heave to on a catamaran

Heaving to as a storm tactic.

Heaving to is a manoeuvre that sailors can use to slow their vessel down to a near-crawl, while fixing the helm and sail positions so that the crew no longer need to actively steer the boat or manage the sails.

When performed correctly it will also place the bow of the boat at angle up into the waves, allowing her to ride them smoothly and producing maximum comfort for all aboard. It should also minimise leeway.

As we’ll see in a moment, the exact technique to achieve these outcomes varies by the kind of sailing boat you have – principally, by her sail plan.

You may occasionally hear power-boaters use the term “heave to” to simply mean throttle back and come to rest. In this article, we’ll mostly be talking about the technique of heaving to under sail instead.

Heaving to is an important safety manoeuvre commonly used to sit out heavy weather, allowing the crew to go below, take a rest and get warm and dry. A correctly hove-to boat can sit out most kinds of weather, just bobbing along on the top of it.

Heaving to can also be used as a low-effort way to simply wait in position for a time, such as when waiting for tides to turn, a squall to blow past ahead, or for a bridge to open.

Some sailors have been known to heave to just to have a cup of tea and a biscuit!

Another application is stopping the boat in a hurry while under sail. For this reason, it’s used in some man-overboard recovery techniques. Naturally, you can dump the sheets to achieve a similar outcome, but that doesn’t apply reverse thrust in the way that backing a sail does.

When it comes to MOB scenarios you could heave to in order to stop the boat rapidly, then engage the engine, throw the sails down and proceed to recover the MOB under power.

Or, if you intend to recover the MOB under sail, you can approach them while hove-to in order to drift up to them slowly.

Not everyone agrees that heaving to is the correct way to initiate an MOB; a lot of sailors advocate for letting the sheets fly instead, forgetting about the flapping canvas and getting the motor on as soon as possible.

You’ll see a lot of complicated explanations online for how heaving to actually works. We think most of them overcomplicate things, and generally prefer to explain it like this:

Heaving to works by backing the headsail so that it fights the mainsail. If you get it right the two sails cancel each other out and the boat stays more or less static, despite being powered up.

That’s not quite the whole story, but it’s by far the easiest way to visualise what’s happening on a hove-to boat.

To initiate a heave-to, you proceed as though you are going to tack the boat, but do not tack the headsail sheets or adjust the headsail in any way. The main, of course, will self-tack, but the headsail (or storm sail ) needs to be blown backwards through the triangle formed by the mast and the forestay, and end up backed – with the belly facing inboard – rather than outboard as it usually would.

Still with us? If you’re lost, think about it like this: you are literally just performing a normal tack without tacking the headsail sheets. At the end of the manoeuvre, you will have a normal, correctly tacked main, but a headsail that is backed and still sheeted as though you were still on the opposite tack.

The result of this is that the mainsail powers the boat forwards normally, but the headsail is backed and resisting it, pushing it backwards; so the boat achieves a state of near-equilibrium and simply drifts.

You should only be travelling at around a knot, but the boat is still powered-up and stiff rather than at the mercy of the waves, and therefore orders of magnitude more comfortable than if you had put the sails away.

That’s the flavour of it: now let’s look at exactly how to heave to on a sailboat, step-by-step.

When heaving to, we’re always trying to achieve the same thing: to get the headsail and the mainsail balancing each other out, so that the boat is still powered-up and comfortable, but no longer making any headway.

Generally speaking, we achieve that either by tacking a sail, but not the boat; or the other way around – by tacking the boat, but not one of the sails. Either way, we end up with one sail fighting the other, and the boat comes to a stop.

The exact procedure to enter a hove-to state is different for different kinds of sailing vessel and rig, so let’s start with the simplest scenario: you are a sloop, with one mast, a mainsail and a jib.

There are two ways for a single-masted sailing vessel such as a sloop to begin a heave to. For both of them, you want to be travelling upwind.

The first way is to literally heave the jib over to the “wrong” side of the boat, i.e. the windward side. This means releasing the leeward sheet and manually hauling the sail through the gap between the forestay and mast using the windward sheet.

It sounds complicated when you spell it out like that, but it’s literally the same set of steps you would follow to tack the headsail, just like normal- except you don’t tack the boat.

The jib moves, the wind doesn’t, so the jib ends the manoeuvre backed and pushing backward against the main; which is still on the correct tack, powered up and propelling the boat forwards.

The alternative is to tack the boat but not the jib.

In other words, the helmsman swings the wheel to wind; the bow of the boat tacks as you would expect, but at the point the crew would normally scramble to release one jib sheet and tension the other to tack the headsail (the moment your helmsman booms “lee ho!” , if you’re that sort of boat) – you instead do nothing.

The jib ends up backed again, because nobody tacked it. The main self-tacks and re-powers on the new tack, and the two still end up counteracting each other. Personally, we feel this is much easier, as you don’t have to manually heave the jib back through the gap between the forestay and mast – you just turn the helm.

Tacking the boat also slows you down a lot right away, which is one of the goals of heaving to in the first place.

Whichever of these two methods you use, the next step is to turn the wheel to windward – as though you are trying to tack back again. Of course, you will not have the speed or drive to do this with a backed headsail.

The purpose of turning the helm to wind like this is threefold:

One, we need to stay head-to-wind to keep the headsail backed. If we bear away, the headsail will fill and we will exit our heave-to.

Two, heaving to doesn’t truly stop the boat. You will still be making a knot or two through the water. This is actually desirable, because you will also be making leeway. By pointing upwind, we aim to use that knot of speed to counteract the leeway and remain more or less stationary over ground.

Thirdly, we want the bow of the boat to be facing up into the waves, at an angle, because that’s a lot more comfortable for the crew than taking them on the beam.

Start by turning the wheel to wind by hand and finding the point at which the boat settles down and maintains a steady course to wind and wave. You can lash the wheel there if you desire, and then you’re free to go below.

If she doesn’t want to settle down, or you’re making too much headway over ground, you may need to ease the sheets or even take a reef in the main.

It’s important to try heaving to in different conditions so that you know how your particular vessel performs, before you need to perform the manoeuvre in anger. Old, heavy-displacement, full-keel boats are often much easier to heave to than modern fin-keelers.

How to heave to on a cutter or Solent rig

Cutters and Solent-rigged sailboats have a single mast, like a sloop, but they have two headsails. The addition of an extra headsail makes heaving to a little more difficult.

The primary headsail on a cutter is usually a large genoa that attaches at the masthead and runs to the bow, or often to a bowsprit enabling a larger sail. This is usually the sail we will be backing in order to heave to.

The second headsail on a cutter is usually called a staysail, and attaches about a quarter of the way down from the masthead. This second, smaller headsail is often set up to be self-tacking.

When you want to tack a sloop, you only need to pull the headsail through the very large gap between the forestay and mast. When you want to tack the genoa on a cutter, you have to fit that extremely large sail through the much smaller gap between the outer and inner stays.

The upshot of all this is that it’s harder to back the sail on a cutter. You can either drag it laboriously through the gap using the winch, or someone can go forward and manhandle it along – but that’s not always the safest in heavy weather.

When it comes to a Solent rig, it’s usually much easier. A Solent does have two headsails, but the outer one is usually a cruising chute and the inner one is the jib. As such, to heave to on a Solent-rigged boat, you perform the exact same steps as on a sloop.

How to heave to on a ketch or a yawl

Twin-masted sailboats, such as ketches, can also heave to.

These vessels have a main mast and a second, smaller mast called a mizzen, and can fly sails from both masts. The difference between a ketch and a yawl is the size and position of this aft mast.

Most ketches and yawls fly a headsail, a mainsail, and then a smaller mainsail from the mizzenmast called a mizzen sail. In other words, only the main mast has a headsail.

You do get mizzen staysails that sit between the main and mizzen masts but they’re rare. To all intents and purposes, we’re dealing with three sails here, and two of them – the main and mizzen – are self-tacking.

The principle to heave to on a ketch or yawl is similar to a sloop: we’re still looking to balance the sails, by backing the headsail and leading the main powered up.

Because the mizzen behaves like a small main, we treat it like one and let it self-tack along with the main. As a result, in our hove-to position, we have a backed jib, and a main and mizzen flying regularly.

We now turn the wheel to windward and use the tension on the mizzen sheet to adjust how high or low we point into the wind and waves. We can also use the tension on the main sheet to influence how much headway we make.

Most catamarans actually can’t heave to. When a monohull heaves to, part of what makes it work is the action of the sails pivoting around the keel – and the keel provides drag and dimension stability that reduce leeway.

Catamarans don’t have keels. At least, not deep keels with heavy ballast bulbs. They can have fixed, stubby little mini-keels, or long retractable daggerboards – but either way, their keels act like the fins on a surfboard rather than ballast. They also have two of them – they just don’t behave in the same way as monohulls.

Cats do have a few heave-to-adjacent manoeuvres that they can turn to in a storm, though. The first is to deeply reef the main, drop the traveller all the way to leeward, and then pull the mainsheet in hard. Lash the helm so that the cat is on a safe, close-hauled course. If you get it right, you should be drifting sideways calmly at about half a knot, with your bows into the waves at an angle.

This is sometimes called “parking” a cat. Performance cats with daggerboards, when performing this manoeuvre, should leave both boards about halfway down.

Performance cats also have the option to pull the boards right up and skate freely over the surface of the waves; either with or without sail power.

Performance cats are fast, so as long as there’s enough room to run, they also have the option to turn down wind and match the cadence of the wave train – creating a smooth ride with minimal wave impacts. They also ride higher on the waves as they accelerate, effectively creating more reserve buoyancy.

When sailing in heavy weather in a catamaran, however, it’s important to remember that cats don’t heel and it can be harder to tell when one is overpowered. They also don’t spill wind and self-compensate in the way that a heeling monohull does, so it’s wise to reef early and often.

Heaving to as a storm tactic exploded in popularity, particularly in the RYA syllabus, after the 1979 Fastnet disaster.

The 605-mile race is held once every two years off the coast of the UK. In 1979, it was struck by a terrible storm; more than a hundred boats capsized and 19 people died.

Hundreds more would certainly have been lost if not for the brave actions of an unbelievable, impromptu volunteer search and rescue operation – the largest ever in peacetime – consisting of more than 4,000 members of the public and pleasure boat owners.

It was later discovered that every single boat that had heaved to had emerged from the storm completely unscathed. Every boat that capsized or been knocked down had either attempted to carry on sailing, or had used a different technique called “laying ahull”.

In the aftermath of these events, the RYA took it upon itself to disseminate the information that heaving to saves lives, and they continue to recommend it as a storm tactic today.

As noted earlier in the article, not all boats actually can heave to, but if your boat is capable, it’s certainly a valuable trick to keep up your sleeve. It’s a good idea to read up on how sailing your sailboat in a storm just in case you need to employ other tactics.

In conclusion, heaving to is an important safety technique that every monohull sailor should be aware of. At a basic level, it provides you with a window of calm and safety to gather your thoughts and take some refreshments. At the extreme end of the scale, it could save your life in a storm one day.

It’s important to practise heaving to before you need to use the technique for real, because every boat performs a little differently. This goes double if you intend to incorporate heaving to into your man overboard protocol.

Heaving to isn’t a particularly difficult technique, but you do need to try it out a couple of times in order to get comfortable with the sail and trim your particular vessel requires to settle down into a nicely hove-to state.

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Sailing Tips: How To Heave To

The ability to heave-to is a key part of seamanship that can keep you safe on the water in any breeze strength.

Throughout this article, we will discuss the basic requirements and steps necessary to heave-to and the advantages of doing so in various conditions. We will go through the basic physics of the position and help you to understand why it is such an effective way to slow down your boat.

While there are various positions that are roughly equivalent to heaving-to, including the safety position for smaller boats and fore-reaching in certain conditions, this is a highly useful skill that gives you a good balance of safety, position holding, and quick maneuverability while on the water. It may require some practice and a few erstwhile attempts before you get the complete hand of it, but in situations where you want to put the brakes on without anchoring your boat, heaving-to is a great solution!

As a certified small boat instructor, I have helped all levels of sailors learn how to perform this maneuver in dinghies and similar boats, but its utility is further extended for keelboats and other cruising classes, including catamarans and trimarans. From my conversations with cruisers and a bevy of research, I can assure you that, as long as you’ve got a mainsail and a headsail, this is a viable option for your needs. Maybe I’ll even be able to give you an insight or two into the physics of the whole setup, but first, let’s take a look at the basic premise and a few steps that will help you get there.

Table of contents

‍ The Basics of the Heave-To

While highly maneuverable and not always the easiest to execute, the fundamental premise of the heave-to is not terribly complicated.

Though the balance and the angle will be slightly different depending on the boat and the breeze, there are four basic characteristics of heaving-to.

Angle to the Wind

Though not explicitly included in the diagram, you should expect to be somewhere around 45-50° to the breeze while in this position. This should be far enough from the breeze that your main is not luffing too hard, but close enough that you aren’t powering up too much.

Jib to Windward

Now this is the most important characteristic of heaving-to. While normally frowned upon, and potentially dangerous when unanticipated, backing the jib like this is what gives you stability in this position. You trim the jib, genoa, or other similar headsail with the windward sheet and keep it locked down. If heaving-to in heavy breeze, it is good to employ a storm jib or to reef your headsail if possible to keep it from being too tensioned up in this position, as a big gust could pull your bow well off the breeze and cause trouble.

Main Trimmed

Trimming the main in this position serves two purposes. First, it balances out the jib's pull to turn downwards. This is why you would not take the main down when attempting to heave-to. Second, it preserves the main from the luffing that will age it very quickly. Moreover, if you want to exit this position, you already have your main set for the close-hauled course that you would take on right afterward. Similarly to the jib, you may find that reefing the sail helps in heavy winds, or is useful in balancing the sails overall.

Tiller to Leeward

Keeping the tiller to leeward helps you maintain this position in two ways. First, it continues to balance the jib’s attempts to draw you off the breeze. Second, by opening the rudder’s face to the water flowing under the boat, you are essentially using the rudder as a sea anchor, helping you to slow down even more and continue to hold your position.

These four steps are the baseline characteristics of heaving-to. How this will work on your boat depends on many factors that you cannot necessarily control or anticipate before you get on the water. That is why, rather than giving you a detailed boat by boat procedure, we are going to talk about some of the fundamental physics that you are working with when heaving-to, so that you know how to adjust for yourself when certain things are happening the first few times you try this out.

The Physics of Sail Control

In the type of boats with the headsail-mainsail sail plans where heaving-to is most effective, be it a catamaran, trimaran, keelboat, winged-keelboat, or simple dinghy, there are a few basic forces with which you have to contend while maneuvering of which heaving-to takes advantage. In order to talk about that, however, we first have to deal with

Centers of Effort and Resistance

In sailing in general, the goal of upwind sailing is to balance what we call the ‘center of effort’ with the ‘center of resistance.’

The center of effort is the theoretical point on your sails from which you generate all of the lifting force for forward motion. It is essentially the engine of your sails and the mathematical center of the sail plan.

The center of resistance is the point somewhere underwater on your hull -- on a keelboat it will be somewhere close to that keel -- which provides the lateral resistance that helps your boat move forward, rather than sliding with the wind.

Ideally, your boat is set up so that when you are trimmed to go upwind, the center of effort is directly above the center of resistance. Once you do this, all that lift generated by the center of effort is channeled forwards by the center of resistance. If they are misaligned, or your sails are overpowered for your boat, you will slide laterally. This is why over-heeling your boat to leeward tends to be slow and cause you to sleep sideways, as this effectively reduces the resistive force. Thus reefing, even though it lessens your sail area and reduces the lift generated, actually helps you go forward in heavy breeze as it keeps you from heeling as much and ensures that your centers of effort and resistance are still lined up.

But I digress. The real point of this is to talk about…

Sail Trim and the Center of Effort

Since controlling the balance of the center of effort is crucial to keeping your boat moving, it is useful to know how each sail affects the center of effort. On most boats, the center of effort is at the deepest part of your mainsail, called the draft, about ⅓ of the way back on that sail. This means that you can consider that as the central axis of your boat.

If you move to trim your jib -- or genoa or other headsail -- you are essentially adding more force forward of that central axis, which, in turn, pulls the bow of your boat down, away from the wind. If you overtrim your jib or, even worse, backwind it coming out of a tack, you will feel your boat pulling downwind towards a reach, or even dead downwind if unchecked.

On the other hand, if you move to trim your main in, you will be adding more pressure to the back half of your main, effectively turning your bow upwind (you can even think about it as pushing your stern downwind!).

It is this balance of jib trim and main trim that keeps your boat sailing forwards and your rudder light and helm-free. You can, in fact, use this phenomenon, along with some bodyweight steering in smaller boats, to effectively sail your boat without a rudder, either for fun or in case of a breakdown. Many double-handed race teams actually do this to practice perfecting their sail trim!

Using this to Heave-To

Ok, ok, that’s a lot of that talk, but how does this help you figure out how to find the perfect heave-to balance for your boat. Well, it actually gives you a pretty good sense!

Heaving-to takes advantage of this balance and flips it on its head. Instead of using these characteristics of the main and the jib to propel you forward, heaving-to uses them to stall out your boat entirely. By trimming the jib to weather, a move that would normally tear you down to a beam reach in a second, keeping the main working, and throwing the tiller over, you effectively have fixed your boat somewhere around 45° to the wind.

If you think about the relationships a little more, you see that each of the three main controls, jib, main, and tiller, are effectively keeping each other in check. The jib cannot pull you off the breeze because of the dual action of the main keeping the stern down and the rudder turning the boat back upwind if it gets any flow. The main will not propel the boat forward because the backwinding of the jib is choking off its airflow, and even if it did get moving it would push too close to the breeze and start luffing. Finally, the rudder, positioned as it is, both acts as a brake against the water underneath and helps keep the boat from turning down, which could end this game of dynamic tension.

Troubleshooting

Because this balance relies so much on the individual characteristics of your boat, it is difficult to say exactly what trim settings you will need to maintain this position for a long time. Therefore, it is up to you to experiment!

If you find that your jib is overpowering your mainsail, pulling you off the breeze, you may have to either reef the jib, push the tiller over farther, pull the jib farther to weather, or get more power in the main. With the opposite problem, you may find it necessary to reef the main quite a bit, or find a better way to haul your jib to weather. It is good to have a rough guess of how to set your boat to heave-to in various wind conditions, as it may be different across sea states and breeze strengths, so I would encourage you to try it out a few times on a few different days so that you know before you need it!

How to Heave-To

After all of that, I would be remiss not to give you the rundown of the easiest way to get your boat in the heave-to position. While it is occasionally possible to simply sail upwind, luff your sails for the moment, and heave your jib to weather, this is not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, and it can put excessive strain on your sails and sheets (and yes, that really is why they call it ‘heaving-to!’).

In general, you accomplish the heave-to by sailing upwind then turning your boat into a nice, slow tack. As you do this, keep your headsail trimmed to the sheet on the old tack, so that when you come out of it, you are trimmed on the weather side.

As you come out of the tack and the backwinded jib is trying to pull you off the breeze, keep your tiller pushed, or wheel turned, to leeward. If you don’t overdo it, the fight between the jib pulling you down and the rudder turning you up should stall your boat out so that you are more or less stopped in the water. Throughout this whole process, the main should be trimmed-in, approximately to where you have it when sailing close-hauled, a little looser if anything, but not luffing.

When you find the point where the main is not ragging, the jib is full but not pulling you down, and the tiller is set, you have effectively heaved-to! Again, finding the right balance may not be that easy, and may require various reefing, trimming, and steering adjustments. These are too many to count, which is why I hope the explainer on the various forces that you are trying to balance will help you diagnose any potential issues you have so that you can make these adjustments as you go!

You should find that this is a highly effective way to stop your boat without the need to drop anchor or your sails. In fact, the little forward progress that you will make from the fact that your sails are still filled should be just about enough to keep your position against the wind and the waves, which would drive you backward in any other unanchored arrangement.

Like anything else in sailing, however, it takes a few attempts, a couple of tweaks, and a good feel for your own boat to master the heave-to, so I hope you take this as a good excuse to get back on the water. Happy Sailing!

Gabriel Hannon

I have been sailing since I was 7 years old. Since then I've been a US sailing certified instructor for over 8 years, raced at every level of one-design and college sailing in fleet, team, and match racing, and love sharing my knowledge of sailing with others!

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