Re: Rudder stall

Is your rudder actually stalling, or is it just breaking free of the water (and hanging in the air)?

Occurrence of the latter while at an angle to the wave will usually result in a quick broach unless you immediately recognize what is happening and brace or sprint your way out of it. This doesn't usually happen in smaller waves nor in big waves - only in the mid size wind waves.

Hard to tell if it's out of the air. The wavelengths are close enough that it could be. I've had the boat broach on me before. This is probably best described as angleing down a wave and hitting the rudder to turn back straight and the boat basically just keeps on turning till it's parallell with the wave. It's very slow and not abrupt like a sudden broach. It feels like the rudder should be in the water at this time, hence I was calling it a stall. I've been wondering what the cause is and how to work on keeping it from happening.

If it is a stall, it might be more likely to be a boat stall as opposed to a rudder stall. By a boat stall, this is what I mean: You catch a wave and start angling down the face, then you stop paddling, your boat speed has gone from being slightly faster than the speed of the wave to slightly slower than the speed of the wave, so your rudder becomes ineffective, and you slowly keep broaching while you're giving it more rudder in an attempt to straighten out the ski.

The fix is to keep your speed from dropping that much, so keep paddling to get off that wave and over to another one earlier, or maintain a straighter downwind line on that particular wave.

Does this make sense?

That makes sense.Thanks. I'm probably just on the edge speedwise when I do this and just hitting the rudder probably makes the situation worse as it adds drag to the boat. Best to do like you said and angle straighter, gain the speed, then transfer over to the next wave while hitting the gas if needed. Reacting earlier to wave changes and anticipating changes is also something I've been working on but have yet to fully grasp.

Rudders can stall and when they do they cause huge drag while becoming ineffective at turning a boat.

In general flat, narrow rudders are most prone to stalling. The elliptical rudder on the Epic V10 is one of the most effective rudders - look at the profile and you'll see a proper airfoil cross section. Of course if you're going too slowly or the rudder's not in the water, the airfoil section won't matter a damn!

If you're in a situation where the rudder is stalling - hard over but not turning the ski - you can try straightening the rudder momentarily to get the water flowing over it again.

But as Nell said, the key is speed; you have to be going faster than the wave. If the crests of the waves are close together, you may have to go down them diagonally to stop ramming the next wave in front, but then... you need to be going at speed or you will broach!

My downwind paddling has lots of scope for improvement but let me add my 10c worth.

Firstly I don't think its just case of keeping your speed up. The trick according to Oscar Chalupsky is to stay on the top of the run rather running down the face of it. Its a case of power on early and stop paddling sooner. If you stay on top of the run you will find that your rudder remains effective and the tendency to broach is greatly reduced. Charging down the face of the run also means that you have lost the potential energy which will be helpful when you need to accelerate in order to link runs.

Of course its not always possible to stay on the crest of runs so you need to have techniques for steering on the face. Leaning the ski offers highly effective steering on runs but the technique takes a lot of getting used to the because the direction of turn is away from the lean. Aside from being more effective leaning does not result in increased drag as in the case of a deflected rudder.

Last time out I did work on leaning the boat and I think it helped quite a bit. I'm looking forward to the wind kicking up again to work on these techniques.

You should have plenty of relative speed to the water to activate your rudder when surfing green water. The water is not moving except a bit in a circular direction on a horizontal axis; the top in the direction of the wave. If the wave has broken, and you are surfing on whitewater, then you have little relative speed to activate your rudder unless in penetrates down into green water.