If you board a sailboat, you will often hear the skipper say to the helmsman: "Lofe!" or "Giblets!". And the coxswain - if he understands - must act on the helm. What do these obscure terms mean to ordinary earthlings?
Lofer is to bring the nose of the sailboat into the wind bed, approaching in the direction the wind is coming from. This is equivalent to reducing the angle between the direction of the boat and the wind. When you luff, you have to tuck in your sails. The sailboat starts to heel over more and more.
If you luff too much, there is a limit where you are too close to the wind and you are too windward, too windward.
Slaughter is to move away from the wind bed, you move the nose of the sailboat away from the wind bed. When we lower the sails, we trim the sails until we reach full downwind. The boat is heeling less, it's speeding up.
Upwind - leeward
"Sit downwind" says the skipper... For a sailor, the windward edge is the one that receives the wind. Conversely, the "leeward" one is on the other side. The leeward side is always the one encumbered by the sails, which naturally move downwind.
