Steering failure is the one that frightens me more than holes in the boat, because a hole you can usually find and stuff, but a boat that will not answer the helm is a boat that has stopped being a boat. It happened to us once on a Biscay leg, forty miles offshore: the wheel went slack, then spun freely, and the bow paid off downwind while I stood there holding a wheel connected to nothing. The cause turned out to be a parted steering cable, but in that first minute the cause did not matter. What mattered was that we had lost control of where the boat pointed, and we needed it back.
Here is how to get it back, in roughly the order you should try things, and how to know when the answer is to call for a tow instead.
Diagnose fast: it might be a five-minute fix
Before you build anything elaborate, find out what failed, because a lot of steering failures are quick repairs. On a wheel-steered boat the usual suspects are a parted or jumped steering cable, a failed quadrant, or a sheared autopilot drive. Get the cockpit sole or aft cabin open and look. Many boats hide an emergency tiller, a steel bar that drops onto the rudder stock and lets you steer directly, somewhere near the helm. If you have one and the rudder itself is sound, you are back in business in two minutes, albeit with heavy, direct steering. Find out now, in harbour, where your emergency tiller lives and that it actually fits, because the day you need it is not the day to discover it is seized in a locker under the spare anchor.
If the rudder itself is gone, broken stock, dropped blade, jammed hard over, then no tiller will help and you are into genuine jury-steering territory. That is the harder case, and the rest of this is about it.
Balance the boat first
Before any jury rudder, get the boat sailing on a steady heading using sail balance alone. A well-found yacht can be made to hold a course, roughly, by trimming sails against each other. More headsail drives the bow off the wind, more mainsail brings it up. Reef the main and ease the traveller to bear away, or back the headsail slightly and trim the main to come up. On many boats you can get a passable course to windward or on a reach with no rudder at all, just by playing the sails, and that alone may be enough to limp towards shelter or to hold steady while you build something better. A balanced boat also makes every jury rig that follows far easier to manage.
The drogue method: the one most likely to work
Ask offshore sailors who have actually done it, and most will tell you the drogue is the system most likely to succeed and the easiest to manage. The principle is simple. You stream a drag device, a small drogue, a bucket with holes, a bight of heavy warp, even a small sail, off the stern on a long line, and you steer by adjusting a bridle.
Set it up like this. Take your longest, strongest warps and aim for a bridle around 80 metres overall, with the drogue at the midpoint. Lead one control line to each quarter, through a block or fairlead, to a winch. To turn to starboard you tension the starboard control line and ease the port one, which pulls the stern to one side and swings the bow the other way. It is slow, it is clumsy, and it works. The great advantage over a jury rudder is that there is nothing rigid to break and nothing for you to lean over the transom and fight in a seaway.
The pole-and-board jury rudder
If you prefer a rudder you can see, the classic is a spinnaker pole, a stout oar, a mizzen boom, or any strong spar, with a flat surface lashed to the end, a floorboard, a cabin door, a locker lid, drilled and bolted or seized on hard. You ship it over the stern or to one quarter, hold it down against the water flow, and turn it to steer. A spinnaker pole alone gives some steerage; with a board on the end it becomes a real, if heavy, rudder.
The honest caveat from everyone who has tested these: they work beautifully in flat water and badly as the sea builds. In any real waves the loads become enormous and you have to slow the boat right down, often to half normal speed, to hold a course at all. Lashings chafe through, blades twist off, and the person tending it gets exhausted. A jury rudder is a tool for a smooth-water approach to a port, not a way to drive hard through a gale. In bad weather, the drogue usually wins.
Where you are decides what you do
A steering failure in open water with sea room is a problem you can work on for hours. The same failure near a tidal gate or a lee shore is an emergency, because you do not have time to experiment. This is why the offshore-passage habit of staying well off the rock-strewn corners matters: a boat with no steering being set towards the Chenal du Four and Raz de Sein is in a far worse place than one drifting in the open Bay of Biscay. Distance from danger buys you time, and time is what jury-rigging needs.
If the failure puts a person in the water, say someone goes over while wrestling gear on a pitching afterdeck, the priority instantly changes, and the drill in the guide to man overboard in tidal waters takes precedence over the steering.
When to call, and what to say
You make the call to CROSS, the French coastguard, well before things become desperate, not after. A boat with no steering but no immediate danger to life, holding under sail or drogue offshore, is a Pan-Pan: urgency, asking for assistance arranged, not a Mayday. If you are being driven onto rocks and your safety is in real doubt, it becomes a Mayday. Getting the grade right is the whole point, and the words for each, in English and the French equivalents, are laid out in the French distress and safety call procedure. Which station hears you depends on where you are, from CROSS Gris-Nez in the eastern Channel to CROSS Etel covering the whole Bay of Biscay to the Spanish border, all reachable on VHF channel 16 or by dialling 196 from a phone, free, around the clock. The map of who covers what is in the overview of the French coastguard and CROSS.
One financial note for visitors. The lifeboats are the SNSM, the volunteer charity, and they do not charge to save life, but a tow home for a boat in no danger can be invoiced, with rates from around 90 euros up to roughly 300 to 395 euros an hour for an all-weather boat. If you can hold the boat under drogue and sail her into shelter yourself, you save that bill and you keep the lifeboat free for the next genuine emergency.
What I took away from Biscay
Our cable failure ended well: the emergency tiller was where it should have been, it dropped onto the stock, and we hand-steered the last forty miles into La Rochelle with aching arms and a healthy new respect for redundancy. But I have practised the drogue rig since, in flat water on a calm afternoon, just to know it works and to feel how slow and deliberate the steering is. That is the real lesson. Know where your emergency tiller is, carry warps long enough to build an 80-metre drogue bridle, and rehearse the moves once in calm conditions, so that the day the wheel goes slack offshore, your hands already know what to do.
