Rudder Control

There are three stations on the boat from which the rudders can be controlled. One on the front port side of the bridge, one at the front port side of conning tower, and one at the front starboard side of the control room. All of them enable you to shift the rudder towards the left, right and center, using the 'a', 'd' and 'w' keys respectively. They also feature a rudder indicator gauge. When the needle is pointing straight up, the rudder is centered, while the red and green indicate port and starboard deflection respectively. The rudder control stations also feature a repeater for the gyro compass. This will show the true heading of the boat. It has two dials, one along the circumference, and one in the center. On the outer dial, each minor graduation represents one degree, and each major line represents 10 degrees. The central dial acts similar to the minute hand on a watch, it will turn once for every 10 degrees the heading changes. The graduations represent 0.1 degrees each, with the numbers denoting each whole degree. In the control room the speedometer, odometer and battery indicators are also visible.

During under water navigation it is good practice to call out when you start and finish your turns, and strive to start and stop the turn quickly and precisely. This makes the job much easier for the navigator, as they can better estimate the turning radius this way. If you use full rudder deflection while turning, you can use a simple rule of thumb to accurately stop the turn precisely every time. When running at high speeds on diesels, the boat will turn 3 degrees from you start to center the rudders till it settles out, on high speed with electrics, it will turn 2 degrees, and slow speeds it will turn 1 degree.