Pete,
That's a pretty big question -- "how sailboats work"? Can you narrow that down a little? I'm not sure this web site can handle an answer to the "how."
I just realized I did not phrase the above properly. I did not mean that the people on this web site could not handle the answer to the question -- what I meant was that a complete explanation of how sailboats work would probably be too huge in volume for the website to handle.
