Square Rig
Square rigged vessels are much less common, and are usually large ships. Nevertheless, they too have sheets on the movable corners of their square sails. Unlike fore-and-aft sheets, though, square-rig sheets do not control the angle of the sails (which is performed using braces); instead, they are used to haul the corners of the sails from their stowed positions down towards the tip of the yard below. They are then not adjusted significantly while sailing until the sail is to be handed (put away) again.The lowest sails, Courses, are trimmed using the sheets as these sails are loose footed being secured to yards only at the head.
Read more about this topic: Sheet (sailing)
Famous quotes containing the word square:
“If the physicians had not their cassocks and their mules, if the doctors had not their square caps and their robes four times too wide, they would never had duped the world, which cannot resist so original an appearance.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)