Sailing into the wind is the fastest. When will developers realize this?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!

Pisses me off every time.

That is all.

I loved Wind wakers sailing.
Sailing with no objectives and founding things for yourself in a big overworld was magical.really made me feel like an adventurer

Are you an experienced sailor and planning to explain what you mean by this?

As far as I know, sailing into the wind (at least directly into a headwind) is definately not the fastest... surely sailing into the wind would essentially cause a "stall" (or whatever the technical term may be)

For modern sails (that are tacked) I would think the fastest way to travel is diagonally away from the wind... wheras old straight shaped sails like a galley the fastest way would probably be to travel with the wind directly.

You can always play this
http://www.sailsimulator.com/



Directly into the wind is only theoretically possible though, in reality 135 degrees into the wind is about the most you can get. But indeed, sails out perpendicular to the boat is not the way to go fast.

Speaking of Wind Waker, the sailing is proven to be nothing to do with load times. Nintendo just likes it.

I think I understand now. 

http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/water-sports/sailboat4.htm

 Bernoulli's theorem

 Newton's Third Law

what!?

Yeah sure. Sailing perfectly into the wind won't work of course, but some degrees off is great. It's far from a simple concept so here is a big fancy link. 
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/sailing.html

Thanks.

I didn't read all of it but I think I understood the vectoring at the end (indeed I hadn't thought about it before but hadn't realised that very simple maths and a keel mean the boat travels faster than the windspeed) However surely this means the fastest way to travel is not into the wind, but at some angle between 90 & 45 degrees from the wind direction (angles of >90 would be into the wind) presumably dependant on the shape of the boat and the sail and the weather conditions etc, but I would think it usually lies in that range.

Unless all you meant was sailing "into the wind" and tacking between left and right* of about 135 degrees from the wind direction should be faster than sailing with the wind, which yes I guess it should be so in games.

*or port & starboard, though as i'm talking about things in reference to wind direction rather than hull direction maybe left and right is appropriate?

Didn't Miyamoto or one of the other guys that worked on the original version say in an interview recently that the reason sailing was so slow-paced and tedious in the original was to mask the loading of data for different areas of the game?  Skip to the 3:00 of the video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_Waker#Wind_and_travel