WHAT to do WHEN the STEERING FAILS
With the right gear, and a little ingenuity, losing your rudder or your ability to steer need not be a recipe for abandoning your boat.
There are countless stories about yachts abandoned at sea because they lost their steering or rudder. It’s a possible contingency that should be anticipated before heading offshore. Boats that have wheel steering should be equipped with an emergency tiller that has been tested and
works. Too many emergency tillers are useless. Test your emergency tiller in heavy air, not only sailing to windward, but also on a broad reach and dead downwind, two points of sail that require a lot of steering.
TILLER TALES
The inadequacy of emergency tillers was brought home to me early in my career as a delivery skipper. I was delivering a 40-foot sloop, with a short keel but an attached rudder, from Grenada to Fort Lauderdale via St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. About 50 miles west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the hydraulic-steering system packed up so we were forced to use emergency steering to San Salvador, in the Bahamas the first island we figured we could find a harbor.
We installed the emergency tiller, but it was not well designed. It was simply not strong enough and collapsed after about five hours. I found that the biggest socket in the socket set would fit on the rudder head, and a block and tackle on the wrench handle led to a winch gave us enough control to sail her 400 miles to San Salvador Island where we stopped and rebuilt the emergency tiller. Sometimes you need to go with what you got.
Contrast that to the tale of Pixie, a 54-foot Gardnerdesigned, ketch-rigged motorsailer. We were on another delivery, from St. Croix to Fort Lauderdale, when on the second day out once again the hydraulic steering failed. But it was no problem as Gardner had designed a proper emergency tiller. Pixie had a center cockpit and a large after deck. We simply undid a deck plate, moved a cushion in the aft-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 6 feet long, we had plenty of leverage. As seen in the accompanying photos from the 2019 Boat of the Year tests, many contemporary production cruisers have emergency tillers as well thought out as Pixie’s.
One common problem, particularly with many older vessels, is that many extended emergency tillers are designed to pass over the top of the wheel. This arrangement may look good on paper, but when you try to use it in heavy weather, especially going downwind, it doesn’t work. The problem is that the tiller must have some height to clear the wheel, but because of its accompanying short lever arm, there’s not enough torque or leverage for it to be effective.
Contemporary yachts, of
course, are very beamy and they carry that beam well aft, which means extremely wide sterns. I think many designers are missing an opportunity on these boats to create a better emergency tiller. Because they’re so wide, why not employ a T-shaped tiller? (There were examples of T-shaped emergency tillers in the Boat of the Year testing, but I’m thinking about one that would extend farther abeam.) It would be easier to fabricate with a longer lever arm extended port and starboard. If control was an issue, two people could steer, one to either side. You’d probably want the “arms” of the T to be easily removable for storage. One thing you already see on some modern boats is an emergency tiller pointed abaft the rudder head. This solves the problem of conflicting with the wheel and pedestal.
On cable-steering systems, the most common failure, naturally, is broken cables. Replacing steering cables at sea