Downwind sailing and yawing

[TimBennet]

It's a learning curve and many cruising sailors I've sailed with never play with controls so they don't learn what effect they have.

That's a good point and when you do experiment you find somethings are counter intuitive or certainly don't follow the obvious 'trueisms'.

We did a lot of tradewind sailing with our old IOR 3/4 tonner running under mainsail and poled out No2 genoa (130%). Like a lot of narrow transomed old IOR boats, she wasn't made for stress free running and when she got too squirrelly for the self steering gear to be happy (20 to 25 kts over the decks), a reef in the main would settle her perfectly. But the main was already tiny (E=9ft) and would have appeared to be already out of balance compared to the huge masthead genoa sticking out on the other side of the boat. But swapping that for the solent did nothing, but a mainsail reef did. You just have to experiment!