I’m looking for a little free advice. I’ve been searching and reading posts on depowering and sail twist with great interest, but I’m still having trouble.

I have a prindle 18-2. I weight 180lbs and my usual crew goes about 230 or so. Both of us are novice sailors. He had never been on any sort of wind powered boat until 4 or 5 years ago with me.

In winds up to about 15mph, I feel like we are able to tune the sails reasonably well making good use of the wind and the boat responds and moves well. In the puffs I can feel the boat accelerate nicely and the tattle tales usually show good flow. The bottom 2 are back on both weather and lee and the top one is somewhere between fluttering back and up.

In winds above about 15mph, we struggle. It feels like the boat gets to a certain speed and just doesn’t want to go any faster. Anything I have tried to do to use the extra power that we have doesn’t seem to push us forward, just on our side. We were out this weekend in what was supposed to be 15-20mph winds, turned out to be closer to 20-25 with 2-3 foot rollers. Nice steady wind, but we just couldn’t find a good grove. I was constantly bleeding air off the top of the sail just to keep us from dumping it. He hardly had a chance to work the downhaul, it was on from the minute we started until we came back to the landing.

With all of this our actual boat speed feels close to the same as on lower wind days. Speed is usually easy to tell because we’ll get a nice rudder hum, and can accelerate just a bit more and the hum will stop. This seems to be about our max speed. This weekend when out, we were rarely able to go faster than “rudder-hum speed”.

Any advice or an explanation of what you do or look for to get over that hump would be great.
Thanks in advance