On the subject of BS Kabuki, Ken burns makes some excellent points, and about those NOAA "H" season predictions...
Hisse et Oh (AKA HEO) is a great French sailing/cruising forum which is always one of the first places I check on the internet every morning. Unlike most forums they (along with the JRA forums) seem to avoid the narcissistic one-upmanship keyboard commando idiocy which most sailing forums fall victim to.
But I digress...
The reason I mentioned HEO is that there is an excellent thread on the subject of folks abandoning boats because of rudder loss or failures. It's well worth reading even if you have to resort to google translate to do it.
Long time readers of Boat Bits will acknowledge that not having an emergency rudder or a dedicated plan of action and the materials to make one is a pet peeve of mine. Especially since a emergency rudder or steering system is fairly easy to cobble together and not expensive at all when you consider the added safety margin it provides as well as the astronomical costs abandoning your boat or being towed might incur.
Then again, a lot of folks are about as intelligent as a bag of hammers as the current aversion to getting a simple life saving vaccination goes to show so, I guess, you just can't cure stupid.
For those readers who don't fall into the bag-of-hammers IQ zone you may want to check out a couple of cheap and simple emergency rudder solutions that make a whole lot of sense.
Listening to a Beach Boys cover
So it goes...
