How We Sailed Our Catamaran 800 Nautical Miles With One Rudder
Losing a rudder 800 nautical miles from land is the kind of problem that reshapes everything about how a boat gets sailed for the rest of a passage. This is the real story of what that actually looked like — the routing decisions, the sail configuration built specifically to compensate, and the fine details of keeping one overworked rudder from being asked to do more than it safely could.
Routing Around Wave Direction, Not Just Wind
Weather routing on a normal passage is mostly about wind. With one rudder, wave direction becomes just as important, arguably more so. Wind and waves broadly travel together, and a wave pattern hitting the boat beam-on makes for a genuinely uncomfortable ride on any boat, catamaran included — worse again when there’s only one rudder available to correct for it.
The routing strategy shifted accordingly: actively choosing a course that kept the wind angle more up the stern than on the beam, even if it meant accepting a softer breeze for a stretch rather than chasing a faster, more beam-on angle. Watching the short-term forecast in 24-hour windows — tracking where breeze was likely to build and adjusting course ahead of it — became a constant, active part of daily routing rather than a background task.
Reading Rudder Load in Real Time
With only the starboard rudder functioning, its actual working angle became one of the most important numbers on the boat to watch — a live readout of exactly how hard that single rudder was having to work at any given moment. In building swell, that angle could swing significantly, sometimes into double digits as waves pushed the stern around. The entire sail configuration described below existed for one purpose: keeping that number as close to neutral as possible, so the remaining rudder wasn’t constantly fighting for control.
The Damage Control Sail Plan
The setup built for this specific situation combined three sails, each doing a distinct job in relation to the daggerboards. Forward of the daggerboards: the fractional spinnaker, and a genoa staysail — a borrowed sail from another boat, torn in half at one point and repaired by Anna, who relocated the clew position slightly higher to make the geometry work properly for this application. Both of these forward sails pull the bow away from the wind, helping the boat bear away downwind rather than round up into it.
Aft of the daggerboards sat the mainsail, deliberately reefed to the fourth reef — a reef depth Anna had been asked to build into the sail specifically because of situations exactly like this one, where reducing sail area safely and controlling the boat matters more than raw speed. Because the mainsail sits behind the daggerboards rather than in front of them, it works in the opposite direction to the forward sails — pushing the stern sideways and encouraging the boat to round up into the wind rather than bear away. Managing that tension between the two opposing forces, forward sails pulling the bow off and the mainsail pushing the stern around, was the entire balancing act.
Deliberately easing extra twist into the mainsail helped reduce that rounding-up tendency, accepting a small compromise — sailing close enough to the lazy jacks that battens occasionally brushed against them — rather than risking chafe against the sidestays, which would have worn through batten pockets over the course of the passage. A tweaker line on the genoa staysail, pulling its sheeting point further forward when needed, added a further small but useful nudge toward bearing away when conditions called for it.
Trimming by Feel, Not Instrument
With this setup, sail trim became something read visually rather than dictated purely by numbers. Watching for the moment the genoa staysail’s luff just started to bubble and fold — a small, deliberately-permitted amount of luffing — served as the signal that trim was correctly balanced. Ideally, the spinnaker would show the same small luff first, with the genoa staysail catching slightly after it; that sequence meant the forward sails were positioned to actively help the autopilot bear the boat away and refill the spinnaker if a wave knocked it off course, rather than being trimmed so tight that they offered no correcting help at all.
Fighting Cross Swell, Not Just Following Seas
The wave environment through this stretch was genuinely complicated — a primary swell arriving roughly from behind, crossed by a secondary swell moving at an angle to it. Every so often, that cross swell would catch the stern directly, shoving the boat sideways hard enough to threaten a genuine broach. This is exactly the load the entire sail configuration was built to manage — softening how much correction the single remaining rudder had to provide on its own, spreading the steering job across sail trim and hull balance instead of asking one component to handle it alone.
For the fuller story of how the rudder was lost in the first place, and the decisions made in the immediate aftermath, read Crisis at Sea: How We Managed Losing a Rudder 800nm From Land. And for the full debrief once the crossing was complete, including why the crew chose not to carry a spare rudder at all, see Atlantic Crossing Debrief: 18 Days, 2,956 Miles, and a Lost Rudder.
This post is part of the Paikea rudder story. Read the full series in sequence here → Paikea’s Rudders: The Full Story
In the Members Library
If you haven’t already, start with Paikea’s Rudders: The Full Story on the free site for the complete rudder evolution. Members get behind the scenes photos and description of our Rudder Build series plus in depth video covering underwater footage and analysis of rudder ventilation.