Mates: For this discussion you should think of a manual transmission in a sports car. When you approach a small hill and the engine starts to lug you downshift 1 gear. If it is a larger hill, you might go down 2 gears. The problem I see when I go out with beginners to intermediates is that when conditions change, they seem to want to drop to 1st gear, which is really not necessary. So, with that analogy in mind, you can see how important it is when wind and sea conditions change to know what adjustment to make to keep the boat on its feet and powered up. The conditions (wind and sea) I'm talking about change in two degrees. They are either BIG changes or LITTLE changes. Say you sailing along and you encounter a puff or a wake or a set of waves. This is a LITTLE CHANGE (downshift 1 gear) and all that is required is a small adjustment of your SHEETS, TRAVELER and BACKSTAY. Actually, I would not even mess with the backstay. Most mast are not bendy anyway - you can't bend them. You end up racking them. Say you sailing along and encounter a MAJOR CHANGE in wind speed or really choppy conditions. This might require that you downshift 2 or 3 gears and would involve the use of fairleads, jib halyard, outhaul Cunningham and boom vang PLUS the controls you used for the little change of conditions. Your most powerful setting should be 4th gear, which you should think of as the gear you normally sail in for the current conditions. Assume your sailing closehauled in say 10 knots of wind and the wind drops to 7 or 6 knots. Obviously, you need more power to maintain your rate of speed. So what do you do? Simple, ease the mainsheet and jib sheet. Then you should pull up the traveler and let off the backstay if it was on. You also might want to bear off slightly and move the crew inboard. When the wind builds back up to 10 knots, you go back to your original setting. Pretty simple changes - right? In the next part, we'll talk about the corrective action to take when there is a significant drop in wind speed plus how you fine tune for existing conditions once they stabilize. The problem with wind stabilization is that it does not last too long. The bottom line is to think about what you are trying to accomplish and don't over react to changing conditions.