What would the definition of chop be, and when does chop transform into waves?
I am thinking of chop as short "nasty" waves throwing you around and being a bit confused as opposed to regular wavesets? My experience with this kind of seas are a bit limited, but just as with waves my feeling is that helming technique is critical for speed. When I lost my rythm sailing in this stuff with the Tornado it was really a quick loss of power and I had to say "sorry" to my crew <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> With relatively flat bottomed boats this must be much worse than with the sharp bottomed hulls of the Tornado. What it boiled down to for us was to jugde which waves you could drive through and which you had to fall off to power over. Helmsman was 100% on the approaching wavesets while crew trimmed and did tactics/strategy.