Losing a Rudder 800nm from Land
It didn’t announce itself. There was no bang, no sudden drama — just Paikea feeling increasingly wrong through the night. The rudders were going to 20 degrees to keep the boat bearing away. Normally if the boat’s out of balance you’d see 10 to 12 degrees of rudder angle. Twenty degrees doesn’t make sense. Something was going on.
Shayne changed the sail configuration first — off the two-sail setup they’d been running through the night, which was already an unbalanced arrangement, and onto the fractional spinnaker to get the boat towing from the front. Still struggling. Still not right. There was even a small wipeout. Time to investigate.
What the GoPro Showed
The first check was weed. With a lot of weed in the water at the time, a fouled rudder was the obvious suspect. Shayne put the GoPro over the side.
Starboard rudder: clean.
Port rudder: gone. Just the stock, snapped off flush with the hull, and open water where the blade should have been.
800 miles from land. One rudder.
Keeping Moving
Slowing down wasn’t really an option. There was good weather to take advantage of, more bad weather potentially behind them, and St Lucia still 800 miles away. The job was to keep Paikea moving safely on one rudder for as long as it took.
The sail configuration that worked: fractional spinnaker, keeping the boat driven from the front and as balanced as possible. Running the fractional rather than a bigger, more powerful sail kept the loads manageable and gave the single remaining rudder the best chance of doing its job.
At nine knots, the rudder angle was sitting around the five degree mark — flicking up to ten in bigger waves, occasionally spiking to sixteen or twenty when a wave caught them. Not ideal, but workable.
The Rudder Angle Indicator: Your Most Useful Instrument
This passage is a good illustration of why the rudder angle indicator is one of the most underused and undervalued instruments on a sailing boat — particularly a multihull.
The number you’re watching tells you how hard your rudder is working to keep the boat straight. In normal, well-balanced conditions on Paikea, Shayne aims to keep that number between two and five degrees. If it’s sitting in that range and not moving much, the boat is balanced, the sails are trimmed well, and everything is working as it should.
When that number starts climbing — moving a lot between four and ten degrees, spiking higher in waves — something is loading the boat up. Too much mainsheet. Too much sail out front. A wave pattern that’s pushing the bow around. The rudder is telling you before anything else does.
Shayne puts it plainly: if you’re sailing at night and you’re not sure whether you’ve got enough sail up, or whether the boat is getting overpowered, watch the rudder angle indicator. It’s the first indicator that things are starting to happen. By the time you can feel it in the helm, it’s already been building for a while.
For less experienced crew on watch — or for anyone who hasn’t yet developed the ability to feel the boat’s loading through the seat of their pants — the rudder angle indicator is the number to watch. It’s that simple, and that useful.
On this particular night, running on one rudder, the single blade was doing double the work it normally would. That context made the numbers look worse than they were — but it also made watching them more important than ever.
Planning the Fix
With St Lucia in reach, the conversation turned to what came next. Two options on the table:
The proper fix: carbon stocks and new rudder blades, designed and built properly. That was always the plan — it just needed to happen sooner than expected, and in the Caribbean rather than a boatyard with proper facilities.
The emergency fix, if it came to that: use the existing welded stock arrangement already in the boat, slide solid stainless steel bar inside the hollow stock, find someone on the island to weld it in place, and build a blade onto it. Plywood if necessary. Better than what the previous owner had done. Just enough to get to somewhere they could do it properly.
As it turned out, they made it to St Lucia on one rudder. The jerry-rigged option stayed as a contingency. But having the plan ready — knowing exactly what the fallback was and what it would take — is what keeps a situation like this from becoming a crisis.
This post is part of the Paikea rudder story. Read the full series in sequence here → Paikea’s Rudders: The Full Story
This wasn’t the first time Shayne had dealt with rudder loss offshore. Read about what happened on a Gunboat 68 in open ocean →Transatlantic on a Gunboat68 – Part 2