No, that analogy is more like sailing a raft in a straight river with an upstream wind. Raise the sail, you go one direction. Lower the sail, you drift with the water in the other direction. You still only have two directions to travel in.
You can change which radial you are riding on by using gravity of passing planets to change your direction, but once you are outside their influence you will either be heading directly away from or directly towards the Sun.
You can do the same maneuvers that current spacecraft use, where you do several loops around the sun to gain momentum. I don't dispute any of that. I just disputed that you can tack upwind with a solar sail like you can in a sailboat.
Nor can you carve banked turns in a Viper fighter ala Battlestar Galactica circa 1978.
I don't doubt that you are a competent sailor. It is true that there is not a one to one analogy between water sailing and solar sailing. But you need to brush up on orbital mechanics. Some parts are counter intuitive. It is simply untrue that a solar sailing craft is limited to only going directly away from or directly toward the Sun. A solar sailing craft can go anywhere in the solar system that it has sufficient time to travel to. Certainly, with current technology, that would be anywhere from Mars inward, and probably a lot more.
I don't doubt that you are a competent sailor. It is true that there is not a one to one analogy between water sailing and solar sailing. But you need to brush up on orbital mechanics. Some parts are counter intuitive. It is simply untrue that a solar sailing craft is limited to only going directly away from or directly toward the Sun. A solar sailing craft can go anywhere in the solar system that it has sufficient time to travel to. Certainly, with current technology, that would be anywhere from Mars inward, and probably a lot more.