Moving Your Stern

Fighter pilots are familiar with the term VIF-ing. VIF stands for “vectoring in flight.” It means that you can move your plane sideways, up, or down while in flight. The British-designed Harrier fighter with its vertical takeoff capability has the greatest ability for VIF-ing because of its control thrusters.

Likewise, you can make your sailboat go sideways—at least the stern. Or in the case of an installed bow thruster, the whole boat can maneuver sideways. And in many cases, this is just what the doctor ordered to get you into the dock or away from an obstacle.

Rudder Angle

You can typically easily tell what position your rudder is in by observing your autopilot meter—if installed. The meter below indicates that the rudder is 20 degrees to starboard from the gauge across the bottom of the screen and thus your wheel is also over to starboard. If you engage forward, which way will your stern move?

The rudder is 20 degrees to starboard (wheel to starboard). Forward gear would push the stern to port.

There may not be a rudder angle indicator mounted on your boat. However, it is important to KNOW and UNDERSTAND your rudder angle. With outboard engines, you “know” your rudder angle by merely looking at your outboard(s) (they are pointing to starboard, port, or centered). If you have a stern drive, or shaft drive your rudder angle may not be readily apparent – in which case, a rudder angle indicator or a center mark placed on your wheel will be helpful.

Whenever you step on a boat as the skipper, it is a good idea to get the feel of your steering wheel. Find the range of turning the wheel to achieve maximum rudder angle on each side (each boat is different). Half of that range will be when the rudder is centered. From this, you can quickly develop muscle memory to know at what position your rudder is according to the turned position of the wheel. You should NOT find the rudder angle by engaging forward gear and seeing how the boat reacts remember “steer-before-gear” when starting from a standstill or doing short bursts for close-quarter maneuvering.

Knowing your rudder angle at all times is a big safety issue. Just imagine engaging gear aggressively but the wheel was hard over – things and people are going to go flying. The steer-before-gear concept allows you to ensure the wheel is centered or turned to force the boat to react as you need it as soon as you engage the gear – this again requires knowledge of the rudder angle. As you become more experienced with a particular boat, your hand-arm muscle memory will develop so that you intuitively know your rudder handle – until then use the half range of turns to find the center. 
 

Using the Rudder to Move the Stern

For inboard engine drives, you can only move your stern sideways by pushing water over the rudder. This means you have to engage forward only since reverse will not impinge water onto the rudder.

Outboard and stern drives push the stern around in forward the same as an inboard drive so you don’t have to worry about getting confused.
 

Exercise MA1 – Move the Stern Sideways:

With your stern to the wind, or on a calm day and the boat is at a standstill next to a buoy, put the wheel hard over to port and engage forward for 1 second. Repeat the exercise with the wheel turned to starboard.

What you learned

The stern of the boat moved to port if the wheel was turned to starboard, and to starboard if the wheel was turned to port.

Outboard and stern drives have the added advantage of being able to literally “suck” the stern toward the dock when in reverse. Simply turn the helm towards the dock and engage reverse.