How would you get home if you lost your rudder? It's a question that everybody who ventures offshore, whether racing or cruising, should think seriously about.
“Call the lifeboat” is possibly the realistic answer - but you might be out of easy reach of the rescue services, and even if you weren't, you'd have to try to control the boat until they arrived.
The standard solution to meet the racing rules requirement for “emergency steering” is to fashion a steering oar, using the spinnaker pole and a bunk board. The pole would be lashed in place between the uprights of the pushpit. Taking a rope to each of the primary winches from the steering end should make it reasonably controllable.
But would the locker lid prove strong enough to withstand the forces involved? It is doubtful that such a system would work on larger, wheel-steered boats. There should be an emergency tiller, which fits directly into the rudder stock, for use if the linkage goes. But what if it's not the linkage that fails, but the rudder itself?
Last November a German Contest 48CS, Y Not, taking part in the ARC, lost her rudder on the tenth day out, but managed to cross the rest of the Atlantic without it. The crew tried rigging a bucket from the stern, with lines to the winches, to create a substitute emergency steering system. But they reported that while this text-book theory “might be good in a mill-pond,” it proved no good for four-metre waves. Instead, they used the sails to steer the boat - for 1,300 miles, in quite demanding conditions, proving that it can be done.
The ISAF safety course, which all skippers and a third of the crew in every yacht in the Fastnet are now required to take, included the use of drogues to provide emergency steering.
The theory is that if you hang a drogue from one quarter of the boat, it will encourage her to turn, and this effect can be used to balance the natural tendency of a sailing yacht to round up into the wind. By attaching a bridle to the drogue, so that it can be adjusted from the opposite quarter, it ought to be possible to control the degree of turning effect - and so steer the yacht.
The experience of Y Not's crew suggest it is not that simple, at least where there are big seas. The first question is how big a drogue to use. A drogue big enough to slow the boat when running in extreme conditions, for example, would slow progress too much.
Peter Smith, proprietor of the East Anglian Sea School, trains lifeboat crew as well as dinghy, yacht and motorboat sailors, and recommends a liferaft-sized drogue - about half a meter across - for emergency steering on a yacht. He has proved it works, he says.
So was Y Not's problem that the bucket was too small? Possibly a longer line, or some chain, might have helped. “You must connect them with chain, to hold them underwater. With rope alone they will skip along the surface,” said Peter. A swivel was also a good idea, he added.
Peter said Y Not was fortunate that the course they wanted to steer was a broad reach, which made it possible to steer by sail trim alone.
“When we are teaching dinghy instructors, part of their assessment is the ability to sail round a triangular course without a rudder,” he explained. “This is done with sail trim and crew weight. Crew weight makes a big difference in a dinghy. You get weight forward so you can make it steer by the bow. You lean it one way and it goes the other. You can't do that with a yacht.
“If you are on a beam reach, I am sure you can do it, but you certainly couldn't sail close-hauled for any period of time just on sail trim, and you couldn't sail down wind for a long period with just sail trim.”
To go up or down wind, Peter said, a drogue would be a big help. Streaming it from one quarter, with a line to pull it across to the other quarter, was “the most successful way I have found to steer without a rudder. That is the way you do it on lifeboats,” he added.
On a yacht, you would use a winch to adjust the drogue. On lifeboats, which have no winches, it can be done successfully just with a block and tackle, he said.
Dealing with steering failure is part of the training for lifeboat crew, and Peter says that a 1.5 metre diameter strong canvas drogue steers a twin-engine 40 foot lifeboat “absolutely fine.”
Lifeboat crew also use smaller drogues to control rescued yachts under tow.
“The drogue stops it surfing down waves and hitting the lifeboat.”
In December, a French Sun Odyssey 43, Zouk, lost her rudder in heavy seas in mid Atlantic. She had been drifting for nearly a week when the crew was rescued by the Jubilee Sailing Trust's tall ship Tenacious.
A towing bridle was fixed to Zouk, but without a rudder, in “terrible” conditions, the yacht proved uncontrollable, and after repeated attempts and snapped tow lines, the decision was made to abandon and scuttle the yacht. Could Zouk have been saved by the use of a drogue? A small one, big enough to give some directional stability, but not so big as to cause problems for the towing vessel, could be a big help in such cases.
Peter also uses drogues when teaching the RYA motor boat syllabus: “When you are out at sea, and have an engine break down, the motion on a motorboat is fairly horrible, because it will go beam on to the sea. A drogue makes the motion better while you are fixing the engine.”
He said one with a two metre throat was a good sea anchor for a 36 foot fly bridge cruiser. So what is the right size for a yacht?
“You are going to have to try it and see!” said Peter. Factors like hull-shape, weight and windage, as well as overall length would affect the size of drogue needed to act as a sea anchor - in which case it would be deployed over the bow, attached to the anchor chain, he said.
It seems that ideally you should carry a small drogue for emergency steering, and for use when towing in difficult conditions, and a larger one to act as a brake - set from the stern when sailing down wind in extreme conditions, or from the bow as a sea anchor.
Unless you are crossing oceans, you are unlikely ever to encounter the sort of conditions likely to require the latter, but a small drogue is a relatively inexpensive item of safety equipment which could repay its investment many times over.
For more information visit www.eastanglianseaschool.com
