Have you ever lost the steering in your boat and what did you do?

Question

We were taking our boat to have the bottom painted and had gone about a hundred yards when my wife who was at the helm said, "we have lost steering" . She then said "do we want to turn around". I told her you have two engines keep going. She did a great job. We went down the channel and made a turn towards the intercoastal. Through the bridge and a zig zag going on to the docks. About a fifteenth mile trip with no steering.

Answer 1

Funny story (after the fact years later). We were fishing just offshore of Ocean City NJ and the cable to the outboard on my 17 Foot Thompson snapped. Could not get it tied together. The friend I was fishing with was 6 foot 5 inches and a former big league pitcher. He actually sat in the middle of the boat on the floor, grabbed each cable and steered us back through the inlet and close enough to the dock at the ramp that we could get the boat out. Thank goodness he was tall...and strong enough to pull the cables!!!

Comments

Good story glad it all worked out.

Answer 2

I have not lost steering on a boat before. With two engines, that is nice because you can power them differently to cause turning, but for a boat that may only have one engine that uses a rudder to steer that loses the ability to use the rudder, i would imagine that would be much more difficult to handle. the only think i could think of is if your motor is still working, and if you have a paddle on board, you could stick the paddle in the water on either the port or starboard sides to help steer (obviously the motor would be at a slow probably no wake speed)... but yeah other than that, i'm not really sure... I don't own a boat and only been on them a handful of times and they were all outboard motor boats...