Half-Way to the Azores: Squalls and Reading Rudder Angles

Somewhere in the first week out of Saint Martin, the weather told us exactly where we were without needing a chart. Grey skies, proper cold for the first time in months, ominous cloud cover — not Caribbean weather anymore, in any sense. Two reefs in the main, our A3 (nicknamed Frankie) up, and wind that kept climbing every time we tried to film it: ten knots, then fourteen, then spells of twenty-plus as the breeze and the sea state built together.

Not the Caribbean Anymore

With Frankie flying and the breeze in the high teens to low twenties, the ride turned properly fast. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen knots boat speed surfing down waves, true wind angle down around 49 degrees, apparent boat speed climbing through the low teens — genuinely quick sailing, and quick enough that a nearby tanker running its engines at 12 knots was the slower boat on the water, which doesn’t happen often.

You can actually see the evidence of an earlier drama on Frankie if you look closely: a repaired rip running straight down the center, from a wrap around the forestay during a manoeuvre on a previous passage. She’d already been patched up back in Saint Martin before we set off on this crossing, and the repair was holding up fine under load — a good scar to have, and a good reminder that a clean, well-timed douse matters more than getting every last knot out of a sail before it comes down. Main trim through this stretch had the topping lift and mainsheet both pulled on hard, with the reefing line left deliberately loose to give the leech twist for the downwind angles we were sailing.

Dead Center of the Atlantic

By day nine we’d reached the actual midpoint — not halfway in time, but genuinely dead center of the Atlantic, with the same distance behind us as still lay ahead to the Azores. We called it, entirely reasonably, our halfway party. Around us on AIS were the only other signs of life for hundreds of miles: another yacht sailing the same course in the same 20 knots of breeze, and a couple of container ships doing the unglamorous work of hauling cargo across an ocean nobody else was crossing that week.

Day Nine: Squalls Set In

The weather turned properly that same day. Nasty squalls came through, Frankie came down for good — no sensible skipper flies an asymmetric through squally conditions — and we dropped to first reef only, surfing down waves at 17 knots in breeze that had been gusting 30 overnight and settled to a still-brisk 25 to 27. Some of the biggest seas either of us had sailed in, at a reported two and a half metres, though the number undersells it: instead of the bow simply going over these waves, they were reaching the cabin top. The main had a rough night of it too, flogging hard enough to look, in Shayne’s words, like it was under attack.

What Rudder Angle Actually Tells You

The most useful diagnostic moment of the whole stretch had nothing to do with sail damage. Paikea’s rudder angle display had been showing larger angles than we’d ever seen from her, and that mattered more than it might sound. Rudder angle is a genuinely good proxy for how balanced a boat is and how well she’s tracking — on a well set-up boat sailing well, you want to see under five degrees most of the time. Anything consistently higher means the boat’s fighting herself, whether that’s weed fouling a rudder, a misalignment somewhere in the steering, or a sail trim issue loading one end of the boat more than it should. Shayne went hunting for weed first, since it’s the easiest thing to rule out, with a proper look at possible misalignment still to come.

None of that took away from what had otherwise been a fast, if increasingly lumpy, few days. We’d kept Frankie flying for most of the daylight hours, only bringing her down overnight as a safety measure — with just one person on watch after dark, and the kids standing some of their own watches, we don’t run sail changes or manoeuvres without an adult on deck, so the evening routine became jib and a couple of reefs in the main, then back out to one reef and Frankie up again once it was light. Eighty-nine nautical miles from the Azores, sitting on the rhumb line, with a PredictWind update due to see what the rest of the passage had in store.

In This Series

This is part of a longer story — six chapters covering the return crossing from the Caribbean to Barcelona, ending with the discovery that kicked off Paikea’s biggest refit yet. See the full series on Crossing the Atlantic: Caribbean to Barcelona, or read it in order below:

For Rudder angle as a diagnostic — what counts as normal, what a persistent high reading usually means, and how to track it down — gets the full technical treatment in the Rudders cornerstone and its members content. Start with the free Rudders page if you haven’t seen it yet.