Gunboat 68 Transatlantic Debrief: Q&A on Rudders, Boards, and Cockpit Systems
With the delivery done, Shayne caught up with Anna to walk back through the trip — what the job actually involved, and to answer the questions that came in from the video series along the way.
The job itself
A delivery like this is more than moving a boat from A to B. There’s usually work at either end — in this case, the Gunboat 68 was heading to a yard in Toulon for scheduled work, which meant real dates to hit: crane bookings, yard slots, flights already booked. The original plan was to sail Antigua to Toulon in one continuous passage, with routing and supplies calculated to make that entirely realistic. Two unplanned events changed that — the mid-ocean impact that damaged the rudder, and a weather system that forced a stop at Gibraltar — but neither derailed the trip. That’s the nature of any offshore delivery: work around what happens, and keep moving.
Sailing on one rudder — same principles, bigger boat
Managing a 68-foot performance catamaran on a single rudder isn’t fundamentally different from doing the same thing on a 42-foot cruising cat — it’s still a sailing boat, just bigger, faster, and considerably more expensive. The core challenge is the same: balance the boat properly, and accommodate a compromised steering setup rather than fighting it.
Where the Gunboat differed from a smaller boat in a similar situation was speed management. Slowing the boat down to reduce load on the single rudder is straightforward enough on its own — the harder part is doing it without going so slow that steering response drops off. And because the boat accelerates so readily, a good surf down a wave can add ten knots almost instantly — twelve knots to twenty-two without much warning. That meant staying genuinely vigilant about sail changes rather than reacting after the fact. Running two headsails rather than a furling system helped here — when there’s too much power in the J1, it furls away and the J3 deploys in its place, changing gears in a couple of minutes with no reefing required.
Why the rudder box design matters
The removable rudder blade and box system on the Gunboat 68 is worth understanding on its own. Rather than a fixed rudder stock running through the hull — the kind of system that requires someone in the water trying to extract a broken stock in a real sea state, genuinely high-risk work — the Gunboat’s blade sits in a box and can be pulled and replaced without that. When the rudder blade failed on this delivery, it destroyed itself cleanly rather than damaging the box or the boat structure around it — the box itself needed only a crack repair. A spare blade, if one had been carried, could have gone straight in without further drama. As it was, a new box was fitted in the Azores and a replacement blade flown in from a sister boat, and the delivery continued at full capability from there.
Not every rudder box design on the market handles this as well — the concept only works if it’s engineered properly, and plenty of boats using a similar approach haven’t executed it to the same standard. This one earned its reputation the hard way, under real load, mid-ocean.
On clutches, slave rings, and why the crew doesn’t clutch sheets underway
A recurring question from the series: why slave rings instead of clutches for redirecting lines around a loaded winch? The short answer is that a clutch only works if the line stays locked in place — and mid-passage, with sheets, spinnaker sheets, and daggerboard lines all needing to move between winches depending on the point of sail, a permanently clutched line becomes a liability rather than a convenience. Sheets in general don’t get clutched while actively sailing on this boat — a loaded, flogging sheet needs to release instantly if something goes wrong, and a clutch doesn’t offer that same immediacy. Furling lines are the exception, parked on a winch rather than run through a clutch, partly for the same reasons and partly because the continuous furling line would need splitting to pass through a clutch at all — more hassle than it’s worth for a line that gets used and stowed repeatedly through a passage.
What’s next
Daggerboard placement and trim came up repeatedly in the video comments, and it’s genuinely a big enough topic to deserve its own dedicated breakdown rather than a quick answer here — that’s coming as a separate piece. Also on the way: a Gunboat 62 delivery for direct comparison, and back on Paikea, a chainplate repair project after movement was discovered in one of the boat’s chainplates in Las Palmas.
In the Members Library, the full systems breakdown for this Gunboat 68 covers the clutch arrays and deck padeye layout in far more technical depth than fits in a debrief.