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

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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.