Rudder Disaster

Losing your rudder is one of the most helpless and unnerving feelings. Don Street has some advice to prevent a drama becoming a fully fledged disaster

First things first, before we kick off this article – boats that have wheel steering should have an emergency tiller that works. All too many emergency tillers are useless. Go out in heavy weather and test your emergency tiller, not only going to windward, but also on a broad reach and dead downwind – two points of sailing that require a lot of steering. The inadequacy of emergency tillers was brought home to me early in my career as a delivery skipper. I was delivering a 40ft (12.2m) sloop with a short keel but attached rudder from Grenada to Fort Lauderdale via St Thomas. About 50 miles west of San Juan, the hydraulic steering system packed up, so it was emergency steering to San Salvador, the first island we figured we could find a harbour. We installed the emergency tiller, but it was not well designed, not strong enough and collapsed after about five hours. It was time to employ the MBLU: Master of the Bastard Lash-up – a degree I learned on the submarine USS Sea Leopard (SS-483), watching Tubes Theadford, a first-class torpedo mate. I discovered the biggest socket in the socket set would fit on the rudder head, a tackle on the wrench handle leading to a winch gave us enough control to sail her 400 miles to San Salvador, where we stopped and rebuilt the emergency tiller.

A welcome contrast was Pixie, a 54ft (16.5m) Gardner-designed ketch-rigged motor sailor. I was delivering her from St Croix to Fort Lauderdale when the hydraulic steering failed. However, it was no problem as Gardner had designed a proper emergency tiller. Pixie was a midship cockpit ketch, so there as a large aft/poop deck. We undid a deck plate, lifted a cushion in the after cabin bunk, dropped the emergency tiller through the deck plate onto the rudder head and we were all set as the tiller was a full 6ft (1.8m) long, giving us plenty of leverage.