Another rudder failure..

[Don C L]

Crewing on a Frers 65 we lost our rudder, just snapped off, in the South China Sea. We were able to get it to sail with right combo of sails pretty well... on two points. One heading took us to the Paracels and the other to shallow reefs west of Philippines. We naively thought we'd just go to the Paracels and try to fix it there. This in 1981. Good thing a kindly RFA freighter came along and gave us a tow or we might have had a bit of an international incident.
Not mentioned yet are issues related to the quadrant too. An acquaintance with a pretty new big Catalina sailed down to SoCal from SF in some fairly rough seas. No problems he said... Until he for some reason checked the quadrant and found he was down to the last thread of his steering cable. Have that spare tiller ready!