How to Sail Upwind in Your Catamaran Catamarans have a reputation for sailing upwind badly, and daggerboards get blamed for most of it — either credited as the magic fix or dismissed as pointless clutter in the saloon. Neither view is quite right. Daggerboards genuinely do provide extra grip compared to the keeled hulls on
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Did Losing a Rudder Damage our Hulls? We’d just crossed the Atlantic on one rudder. We knew what had happened — the port stock had failed mid-ocean, the blade had torn away, and we’d sailed Paikea nearly 800 nautical miles to the Canaries and then on to the Caribbean to sort it out. What we
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Navigation Systems Onboard Paikea Sailing offshore takes more than a phone with a local SIM card and hoping for the best. Out past the range of any cell network, communication and navigation both run through one piece of equipment: an IridiumGo satellite unit and its dedicated aerial, which Shayne built and mounted using a custom
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Atlantic Crossing Debrief: 18 Days, 2,956 Miles, and a Lost Rudder We’re in St Lucia. The crossing is done. Time to go through what actually happened — the good, the bad, and the parts we’re still thinking about. This is the full debrief on our 2,700 nautical mile passage from Las Palmas, Gran Canaria to
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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
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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.
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