Thanks for the very nice remarks John. I will pass them on when I play my next game with the good Captain on the 21st.

What he did in this instance to swing was to raise his stern anchor and set sails to allow the wind to act on the rearmost set, whilst allowing the formast sails to spill the wind. Thus the forrard anchor acted as a pivot and as soon as he was facing the correct way he trimmed his sails to the new wind direction and slowly started to make way. Not reccomended if the tide is against you when you have turned, and you are that close inshore. On occassions we use ships boats to tow out the anchor, and winch the ship around by use of the capstan.

Our rules for bow chasers are that they can only be used in a chase situation, and if a line drawn parallel from each side of the chaser's base intersects with the chasee's base. Pretty much the same for stern chasers. We assume that as the long nines were generally for ranging shots and chasing they are loaded with single ball at all times. At all ranges only one A chit is drawn for the pair of chasers, and they take two cards to reload as for broadside guns. We toyed with making it three cards to allow for fine adjustment, but decided that as the gun captain would probably be the best one the captain had this was unnecessary, and made play easier because there was no need to add extra complications to the normal loading proceedure as stipulated in the rules.