When we first purchased Casulen II, she had lost her rudder in the Clyde, and the previous owner had made a new one for her. The only problems with this were the excessive turbulence and the fact that the rudder was at lest 5 degrees misaligned. After sailing on Windermere for one winter season, we decided that we needed to make a new rudder. Having looked at several other Corribee rudders, and listened to advice from a yacht designer, we decided that we should make a semi-balanced rudder without a skeg, but also make the rudder as strong as possible and reinforce the rudder tube. The reasoning behind this is not straightforward and there was a lot of conflicting advice. The main argument in favour of a skeg-hung rudder is that it offers protection from impacts with submerged objects or fishing lines and also in big seas when the rudder is under immense pressures. However, as Casulen II is fin-keeled, we reasoned that the rudder would be fairly well protected from lines and floating objects. Also, no modern racing yachts have skeg-hung rudders and these are taking on some of the biggest seas in the world. We decided to make the new rudder longer and narrower than most Corribee rudders, as we had been advised that this would make the helm lighter and by making it semi-balanced, far more responsive. A NACA 0012 profile was decided upon. This may sound overly complex, but is a fairly safe compromise for the average yacht, and well worth the extra effort if building from scratch. The rudder shaft was made from 1inch solid bar with three sets of tangs welded on the sides of this before being brought together and welded. All of this was 316 stainless steel. The rudder was made by laminating four pieces of ¾ inch plywood around the rudder post using thickened epoxy to stick them all together, having first routed out the shape of the tangs and rudder post. After shaping, this was coated in epoxy before being sheathed in epoxy and woven cloth to seal it. It has since received a further coat of epoxy, when we epoxied the hull, prior to applying coppercoat antifouling.

As the old head fitting was cracked and suspect, we bought a new Plastimo head fitting (part no. 13383), and made a new teak tiller to fit this. One of the features of this head fitting is that it has a bolt running through the whole assembly, including the rudder post, this making it almost impossible to lose the rudder, a fate not unknown to many Corribees, ours included! This rudder has now been on the boat for 2800nm, the helm is very light but responsive and even in winds over 25kts requires little effort when helming.

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