Can You Steer Your Boat Without a Rudder?

When I was planning to join a friend to deliver his boat across the Atlantic a few summers ago, one of our main concerns about the passage was a back-up plan should we lose or have trouble with the single spade rudder. Like most modern boats, the rudder was unprotected by a skeg so a collision with a whale or a container would conceivably bend the shaft or even break it. Also, the boat was equipped with a single below-decks autopilot that was very well installed and had proven completely reliable over many thousands of miles. But, if it failed, what was our plan? In the end we decided to trust the integrity of the rudder and the reliability of the autopilot and that trust was not misplaced since we made the 17-day passage without incident. But, that is not always the case. In a Caribbean 1500 rally a few years ago, three cruising boats from high quality builders had rudder failures and each boat had to jury rig a steering system to get to the Caribbean. Towing drogues and balancing the sail plan turned out in these cases to be the most successful backup steering system. To figure out how this system can be made to work best, veteran offshore racer and yacht captain Mike Keyworth put the drogue technique to the test by launching his Swan 44 without her rudder and only a drogue to steer her by, in his case a Gale Rider. The key finding in his experiments was that the control lines to the drogue work best when led to snatch blocks positioned on the gunnels at or near the boat’s center of lateral resistance or about amidships.  Check out the video Mike made below. If you have a steering story to share with us, you can email it to me here: george@bwsailing.com
Watch the Mike Keyworth video.