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Making Passage w/o a Rudder

20K views 60 replies 30 participants last post by  bobwebster 
#1 ·
This is something I haven't been able to find any information about. I have read a number of accounts of people losing not just their wheel or tiller but their entire rudder while making passages and having to call for assistance. Is there a collection of ideas somewhere for how to get out of this jam on your own, somehow sailing without a rudder, making a new one out of (?), or .. (?).

What would you do if lost your rudder ?
 
#2 ·
There have been a couple of articles in Sail and Cruising World over the past year about just such a scenerio. Don't have the months they appeared offhand, but you might check their websites for them.

The solutions I have seen most often is either using a whisker pole with something lashed to it, or using the sails themselves to steer with in combination with a drogue of some sort.
 
#3 ·
We once satisfied a race safety committee for an overnight off-season race with an "Emergency rudder" that consisted of a pre-drilled bunkboard, a couple of Ubolts and the Spinn pole. It was never put to the test (thankfully) and to be honest I doubt it would have lasted long. The forces on the rudders of many boats are considerable (who hasn't leaned into the wheel or tiller as the weather helm loads up in a puff) and to expect some cobbled-together contraption to work long term is a bit naive.

Compounding the problem is that the rudder isn't likely to fail in benign conditions - putting extra strain on the "spare" and making rigging it in the first place problematic as well.

It has been done, people can be quite inventive and ingenious when necessary but for a genuine, usable backup rudder I think it needs to be a dedicated backup, engineered and tested prior to the emergency.
 
#53 ·
We once satisfied a race safety committee for an overnight off-season race with an "Emergency rudder" that consisted of a pre-drilled bunkboard, a couple of Ubolts and the Spinn pole. It was never put to the test (thankfully) and to be honest I doubt it would have lasted long. The forces on the rudders of many boats are considerable (who hasn't leaned into the wheel or tiller as the weather helm loads up in a puff) and to expect some cobbled-together contraption to work long term is a bit naive.
The mentioned contraption is the standard equipment readily available on all SIGMA 33 OOD's; even completely in line with the class rules. Instead of u-bolts I had a couple of long jubilee clips (the clamps used to tighten cooling water conduits to engines). I never had to used it but did practice with sail trim to steer the boat. If the rig is properly set up is is truly amazing what you can achieve with just the sails. I have to admit I never tried this in bad weather.
 
#4 ·
Thank you all for the responses.

I've been reading a lot about this today and think I may have found my solution. Since I will have windvane self-steering anyway, there appears to be an emergency rudder attachment that you can get with the windvane gear, so that will probably be my first backup/spare. I'm struck by the incredibly fat/piggish bloat of a price for the thing though and will have to close my eyes when I place that order for sure. In fact I'll pay for the windvane self-steering, but I might figure out how the emergency rudder works and have something fabricated instead of buying that part of it. There is such a thing as too expensive.
 
#5 ·
Before there were rudders there were steering boards, usually attached to the right side of the boat which is why we still call it the "star board" side. And because you could smash the steering board against a jetty, they tied the other side of the port to the jetty when they were in port. So the left side became the port side of the boat.

Steering boards still work, anything that spoils the hydrodynamics of the boat and makes it turn one way or the other can steer it. On a nicely balanced boat, you can also steer by trimming the sails and the rudder should be dead center, pretty much. So...aside from the new designs that have next to no stability without a rudder? Losing it should fall into the category of "damned inconvenience" not "emergency".

Having a full keel, so the boat tracks in straight line, will of course help if you are trying to make do without a rudder. That's one reason traditional cruisers may favor a full keel, too.
 
#6 ·
Wind_Magic... Not all wind vanes have the ability to double as emergency steering so check the details before installation. One of the reasons I recommend full skegs to full time cruisers is because they are much less likely to lose a rudder AND much less likely to get rudder damage from submerged objects.
 
#7 ·
Many years ago, we were sailing thru Windward Passage (Cuba & Haite) on a Piver trimaran. A rogue wave ( at nite of course) pushed us sideways and the wheel spun around all by itself becomeing useless. I went down below, made some hot chocalote, came up with two mattress and long anchor ropes and put them over the side on each of the hulls. Worked great, of course on a 35 footer it must have had a 20 ft beam. with the gennie up we sailed right into Port Royal, Jamacia. the coast guard had to come out an bring us into the dock and it took a month to get parts out of the states but it made for a hellava story.
 
#8 ·
In the early 80s, the shaft sheared off the rudder on my Mariner 40 ketch while crossing Georgia Strait. I lashed the wooden spinnaker pole to the teak taffrail and with some paddling it served as a tiller to take me back into False Creek under power.

Knowing things can happen, I have ordered the spare rudder system option for my new Hunter 49.
 
#9 ·
There was an article in (I think Sail) a few months ago about a boat that lost its rudder in a race. They had a large diameter rope anchor rode that they double and then daisy chained. They then attached a small anchor and drug the whole thing behind the boat with the ends coming forward to the genoa lead cars and back to the primary winchs. (I think I got most of the details correct) The rode created enough drag to steer the boat, the anchor kept it submerged, and they winched it to one side or the other like a rudder to steer.

I don't know that I would call that set-up ideal, but good to know about.
 
#10 ·
Thank you all for the terrific responses. I hadn't seen in my mind how you could steer a boat without some kind of a rudder until reading your responses, and I really like the "drag something" solution. I just hadn't thought of that. That solution of dragging an anchor and using winches to move the temporary "rudder" to steer, that's fantastic! I guess the key would be getting the amount of drag right for the speed of the boat, that you would have to adjust it from time to time while you were moving.

Thanks again! It gives me some hope that I might be able to come up with a solution if I got into trouble, so long as I had enough line, mattresses, etc, on board! :) But of course that would be like ... not even a backup plan, but rather the desperation fallback. I'll try to get some kind of a spare type solution with the windvane gear.
 
#11 ·
The drag sounds very clever, actually. Very much like rigging a paravane on a long lever arm (which would increase the effective steering effort) instead of using a rigid pole, which would have been much shorter and had less effect. Sounds like someone on that boat was a damned fine engineer!
 
#12 · (Edited)
I learnt many years ago to use just rope as a rudder.

The idea is to tie a lot of rope into a man size mess of rope.
Then from that mess of rope, two cables come to port and starbord winches.

You can, by reducing the lenght of the rope to one side, move the mess of cables to that side and thus cause more drag to that side of the boat, an cause a slow turn.

You can motor an sail with it. Guaranteed.

what you would call that in the US I don't know, but if I translate, its somethimg like "drag drone".
 
#14 ·
Giulietta said:
I learnt many years ago to use just rope as a rudder.

The idea is to tie a lot of rope into a man size mess of rope.
Then from that mess of rope, two cables come to port and starbord winches.

You can, by reducing the lenght of the rope to one side, move the mess of cables to that side and thus cause more drag to that side of the boat, an cause a slow turn.

You can motor an sail with it. Guaranteed.

what you would call that in the US I don't know, but if I translate, its somethimg like "drag drone".
Steering by slowing down the boat doesn't sound like the best way to go. I selected a boat that is balanced enough that I can sail her by balancing the sailplan. This characteristic was one of the reasons I selected the Tartan 34C for offshore sailing. Not only does it provide a backup for steering but it also provides redundancy for the windvane steering system. As a matter of fact my first Atlantic crossing was done without a windvane and the boat sailed the trip by herself just by balancing the sailplan and tying off the tiller. That boat was a 22' Carl Alberg designed Seasprite and she was an unusually balanced design.

Of course on a delivery or sailing on a friend's boat you may not have the advantage of sailing on your first choice of boat so emergency steering is a consideration. I would go with a combination of balancing the sailplan and using a spar and piece of plywood rigged as a sweep. The closer to selfsteering you get with the sailplan the smaller the sweep needs to be and therefore the easer it is to rig and handle.
All the best,
Robert Gainer
 
#15 ·
The December 2006 Cruising World has a section dedicated to this very topic. The concept of using a drogue and controlling it with starboard and port lines led through the ends of a whisker pole and through snap blocks (or just snap blocks if your boat is too beamy) to the winches seems to make a lot of sense to me. The nice thing about this solution is that you could actually practice using the method (without the whisker pole) to see how well it would work for your boat.
 
#16 ·
Tartan,

Trust me I know what I am talking about. The rope drogue (thanks sailaway), really works. The drag is marginal (thats what turns the boat), and it works.

As for steering with sails, its not for everyone, not for everyone......my friend

The guy asking this question surely can't do it, otherwise wouldn't ask this question.
 
#17 ·
Giulietta said:
As for steering with sails, its not for everyone, not for everyone......my friend

The guy asking this question surely can't do it, otherwise wouldn't ask this question.
No, I actually can't even imagine how it is done. I mean I know about sheet to tiller systems, but that still assumes there is a tiller and rudder to turn. How you would set the boat up to just go in one direction using just the sails I really have no idea, I thought the boat would always round up into the wind.

Educate me. :)
 
#18 ·
Its simple, (but my English may lack some words, and others here might explain to you in better words), I wil try.

If you think of a wind indicator, Wind vane, on top of a Church, it allways points to where the wind is blowing. This is because its built so that a larger flat vertical portion of it is acting as a "wing", and has a tendency to be "blown" with the wind.

If you now translate that to a boat, and use more or less sail behind the mast (pivot point, almost), by pulling the sheets and doing other trims to make the sail more efficient, you can make the boat point into the wind and away from it.

That is it!!! Simple said, hard to do WELL. And as Tartan said, depends on the boat, I say depends on the fingers of the man playing guitar!!! Most have a guitar but only few make it sound good!!
 
#19 ·
"That is it!!! Simple said" .. yeah right that's it.. :) When we lost stearing off the the coast of Puerto Rico I had done more uncontrolled jibes in the space of a few minutes than I care to remember. :)

We didn't loose the rudder though and while I was trying to get control of the boat with sails we were digging out the emergency tiller. I never did get it under control untill we got the emergency tiller working. (32ft catalina in 20+ knots, 3-5ft seas)

In theory it works. :) Given enough time and leeway. Only I had reefs 1/4mile to leeward.
 
#21 ·
Giulietta said:
Trodzen,

I know exactly what you mean...it's all nice... on paper....again not easy and very unreliable, as seas and winds make it harder.

I stick with my rope mess thingy!! Besides without rudder, fast is the last I want to go anyway!!
It's funny how we are all trapped within our own experience and education. I have used a drag, that is to say a bucket on a dock line, to steer a single engine powerboat that lost steering. A drag is fine and it's worth knowing about the technique because it might be appropriate one day. After all you might lose steering on a sailboat while motoring near shore. Of course on a powerboat with twin engines the loss of steering is a minor annoyance at worst.

But while under sail I think steering with balance and if absolutely necessary the smallest jury rudder possible might be a better choice then a drag. A drag doesn't lend itself to use during severe weather for one thing. The response time isn't adequate and the strain is significant when you are sailing with any reasonable speed. You also have a greater chance of problems popping up with a jury rig like a drag. You can expect problems ranging from the sea sweeping a crew member off the deck to fouling the gear because of the boats movement during a storm if you try to steer using something that requires an exposed crewmember and lots of line run all over the place.

On the other hand I have sailed warm and dry in the cabin during a storm while the boat sailed herself with the tiller tied and in fact she would sail just as well if the rudder was gone as long as the boat could sail a reasonable course using balance alone. The bottom line is there is more then one way to handle a problem but my experience is that planning ahead and selecting the simplest solution with the fewest chances of failure is the best way to go. And each boat is different so you need a plan that works with your boat, rig and gear. You also might consider things like this when you are selecting a boat. I am sailing to Greenland this summer and I picked a Tartan 34C because she is suitable for offshore work. Among other things she will sail herself without the need of a windvane system. This is handy if my windvane fails or the rudder decides to become argumentative.

And bad weather is not the time to start experimenting with something like this. Whatever method you select, practice it during the summer in nice warm calm weather. I have experience with sailing in bad weather and it is harder then you think. When things go bad you are probably worn out and not thinking straight so you make mistakes unless you have already thought out a plan and know where you put all the parts that are required to implement the plan.
All the best,
Robert Gainer
 
#22 ·
Robert,

"I have used a drag, that is to say a bucket on a dock line, to steer a single engine powerboat that lost steering".

The drogue I mention is not a bucket, its a "macramé" (right word??) of tied rope, tied with two cables in a "V" shape, where the drogue stays in the corner of the "V".

The two ends of the "V" go, one to starbord and one to port. I wish I could draw it, because its hard to explain. Pass each thru a winch on each side of the boat, but its a single cable, and just use the ropes to steer. Please go out and try it, Leave at least 20 meters on each "V" leg. Remeber not all boats sail balanced like yours, and not all can balance it like you do. I would never use a bucket.
 
#23 ·
Giulietta,
Although I have no idea what a "macrame" is >grin< ?
I understand exacly what your trying to discribe, this is the way I have pictured a drogue for stearing to work, using winches to turn port or starboard.
 
#26 · (Edited)
Giulietta said:
The drogue I mention is not a bucket, its a "macramé" (right word??) of tied rope, tied with two cables in a "V" shape, where the drogue stays in the corner of the "V".
I understand what you mean. Now it's a case of different ships, different long splices. In the case of the powerboat a bucket was an instant solution and I needed a fast way to steer. As far as sailing offshore goes your method does work and it's worthwhile describing it so people have the greatest range of options and ideas when they most need it.

But I stand by my advice which is based on my own experience offshore. If you can't balance the boat then other ways such as your drag may be the only option but trying to learn to get the best out of your boat and learning to balance the boat is worthwhile and if you have a suitable boat and the skill then the safer, simpler way is avoiding lines with the chafe, exposed crew and other problems that come from towing things. Given a choice I will almost always pick the simplest most robust way to get the job done.

Please don't take this as criticism because there is more then one way to get the job done and the skipper at the time is the one to decide on a course of action and what he decides to do is often part of an overall plan. I can easily see a set of circumstance where the skipper has decided on a choice of sails forced on him by gear breakage or damaged sails. Balancing the boat may not be an option and your method might be the best choice so it's worth discussing and planning for.
All the best,
Robert Gainer
 
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