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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

> With boats, others mentioned that wind provides its own frame, and there are separate words still for "left" and "right" in that frame.

There's windward (towards/upwind) and leeward (away/downwind).

Are there left and right too?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward

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What matters to sailors with respect to the wind is the angle which it meets the boat or the orientation of the boat with regard to the direction of the wind. For that there are dedicated names known as the points of sail which include: close hauled, close reach, beam reach, broad reach, run, and in irons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_sail

Good point! :)

But points of sail don't have any handedness, correct? I.e. they're mirrored on both sides of the wind.

As mentioned in another comment, tacking (with its active directionality) is probably the closest to handed-terminology.

>But points of sail don't have any handedness, correct? I.e. they're mirrored on both sides of the wind.

The right-of-way rules in sailboat racing depend on who is on 'port tack' or 'starboard tack' (ie, they differentiate those mirrored halves). There's nothing physically special, though.

There's port/starboard tack, where the wind is coming from the port/starboard side of the vessel. It can be confusing because, for example, if a boat on a port tack tacks to port, the result is a starboard tack (once the bow crosses the direction from which the wind is blowing).

That has another ambiguity: in wind, directions are presumed to be naming the source of the wind, not the sink.

After your first few hours on deck in foul weather, that one will seem obvious.

Even without the wind, the separate words help. In crew (rowed) boats, people sit backwards. And then boats are stored on racks upside-down. It can get complicated!

And the British decide to make things more confusing by referring to the sides of the boat as strokeside and bowside.

Strokeside is always port, even if in that particular boat stroke's oar is actually on the starboard side- and even in a sculling boat!

And for some reason half of the world have port and starboard channel markers as red and green, and the other are green and red. I don't know who's fault that is!

Windward and upwind are different in my book: windward is anything to the side of the boat opposite the main boom, whereas upwind is you draw a line perpendicular to the wind direction and anything toward the wind from that line is upwind. You could have a mark downwind of you on the windward side if you overshot the last tack before a mark.

For wind, you have “lifted” (wind shift that takes you closer to your destination) and “headed” (similar but away) when going to weather. Downwind, it’s a little different as the wind just “shifts” and you trim sails or steer to take advantage.

And the wind itself backs (anti-clockwise) and veers (clockwise) with height.

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