A snowboard is a pretty good analogy for a monohull often be on plane or very light in a seaway. If you think a board in 18" of real powder (Light, Rocky Mountain powder) then can use it as example.

No analogy is perfect. (As Mark observed, some analogies seem extreme.)

When I've been sailing is snotty, big waves with swell from a different direction (but still forward) I think of what I used to do on skis before I had by knee surgery years ago.

The action, and strategy is similar. You have the equivalent of compression turns, burning off speed for control but adequate ability to get through the next trough, etc. When I've sail at night in such condition at night it's easier to feel that same sense of rhythm. You want to deep the boat "on the water" and not in the air. You maintain control in a much similar fashion. You look a few waves ahead, pick your line while thinking through what you're going to do with the next few. Of course you get out of synch for a buch of reasons (some missed signals about the swells, some because I make a just didn't figure it out, sometimes to much speed, occasionally to little to "pop the crest".)

But let us not digress into a discussion of "systems realism" vs. "systems nominalism" or analog vs. digital computing or the latest possilibility of quatum vs. our current digitial computer logic.

Any way you should have enough snow up there this year?