A FIRST SOLO OCEAN CROSSING BECOMES AN EXTRAORDINARY TEST FOR JAMES FREDERICK WHEN HIS RUDDER FAILS 1,000 MILES FROM SHORE
Staring down from the cockpit into the cabin of my vintage sloop I tried to imagine watching her fill with water. What would float freely first? How long would it take before her decks were awash? I was alone and adrift 1,000 nautical miles away from the Hawaiian Islands with a broken rudder and only two choices before me. I could either figure out how to steer Triteia, my 1965 Alberg 30, or I could call for rescue and scuttle her once a cargo ship arrived.
Less than an hour before I’d been hand steering, desperately trying to get Triteia to find her course. It was our first day in the tradewinds after departing from Marina del Rey, California, bound for Hilo, Hawaii. Even allowing for the usual challenges of running with the seas and the wind, something was off, Triteia refused to hold true. I’d disengaged my old Sailomat auxiliary rudder windvane and taken the helm to try and find her groove. The winds were Force 4-5 with 2m seas.
Suddenly the tiller went completely slack in my hand, quietly falling to starboard as the boat came hard up into the wind to port. There was no sound, no dramatic event, but within seconds, as I swung the tiller back and forth with no resistance, the gravity of my situation rang loud inside my head.
I quickly furled in the headsail to slow the boat. My first thought, and hope, was that maybe the securing bolt in the tiller head had sheared off. This would have been an easy fix that I could do in an hour. Triteia is a full keel boat with a cutaway forefoot, she has a large rudder made of mahogany that runs the aft length of her keel and is attached with a bronze plate at the foot and a bent bronze tiller shaft that runs up a tube into the cockpit. I knew the first thing I needed to do was see what was happening below the water, so I zip-tied my GoPro camera onto a seahook, hung it off the stern and pointed it the best I could at the rudder. Reviewing the footage, I could see the rudder had separated from the tiller shaft and was swinging free. The rudder is a sandwich construction with each of the hardwood planks married to one another and bound together with long bronze rods. Three of these rods had failed.
It was clear I needed to get in the water and try and lash the rudder to prevent it from suffering any more damage. If possible, I’d run the lines up either side, giving me a means of steering the boat. I contacted one of my shore team via my Iridium Go, explained briefly what had happened and that I was abou
