Since rolling is the fastest form of movement on land and also makes it easy to change directions accurately, rolling is the most commonly used form of movement across land. In order to keep maximum speed while rolling, the A button must be pressed within a 2 frame window. It is also interesting to note that rolling is different in Wind Waker HD because the minimum roll speed has been greatly increased. Other forms of movement, such as sidehops, may also be used in scenarios such as when holding a statue.
Note: All of these values are taken directly from in-game memory addresses. Speed is measured in units per frame. Each quadrant of the ocean is 100,000 units.
As sailing makes up the majority of your travel time in The Wind Waker before you can obtain the Ballad of Gales, it is vitally important to optimize your sailing in order to cross the over-world map as quickly as possible. Although both zombie hovering and superswim can be used to cross the Great Sea without the aid of the sail, and in some cases are necessary to accessing areas and equipment early, they are not always the most reliable, accurate, or in the case of zombie hovering, the most most timely, unless used in a TAS.
Sailing is tedious and may seem at some points unbearable, especially when you must travel from one end of the map to another. However, sailing, without the assistance of the Ballad of Gales, can be optimized to speed up the rate at which you can travel from point A to point B. The most common method of doing this is Sail Pumping. To do this, you press the button your sail is on, immediately followed by the A button to put the sail away, and then pull out the sail again to continually repeat the process until you reach your desired destination. The reason why this is so much faster than sailing normally is because each time you pull out the sail you get a small burst of speed, presumably from the wind hitting the sail, which propels you forward faster than usual. By continuously pulling out the sail, you continuously obtain those small bursts of speed over the course of sailing. In addition, by pumping the sail, you can travel at any angle between 0 and 90 degrees from the direction of the wind and maintain the same speed. This is especially useful as it can save time from having to change the direction of the wind.
Note: The speed for Sail Pumping, has not been taken from memory addresses, but rather from time comparisons of frame-perfect inputs over a set distance of one quadrant. The rapid burst that occurs when pulling out the Sail brings your speed to 80, but this speed decreases every frame after, making a manual calculation more accurate.