My experience is only from owning, repairing, maintaining, sailing and cruising production catamarans for the past 11yrs, so my knowledge isn't as great as those real engineers who haven't (insert tongue in cheek emoticon).

First, I would not feel comfortable lying ahull in a catamaran at all. Yes, it is completely comfortable until it is dangerous. And there is a thin, unpredictable line between those two states. Short of deploying a parachute anchor, keeping the boat moving in any direction but a beam reach is the safest thing to do. Forereaching is good until you lose the jib and can't. Running with a drogue is a very comfortable and safe way to operate a catamaran. I also would not feel comfortable heading into the North Atlantic in January without at least a drogue of some type on board, or having prepared in advance some spare equipment to use as a drag device.

As for the jib, I don't really understand that part. They noticed the problem occurring, but did not seem to care. And when it parted, they did not have any spare line to use? Or even attempt to reverse the line and tie the ends together? I'm not questioning their decisions or actions on this - I just don't understand how the problem occurred and how it contributed to everything else.

The weather helm is most likely caused by the very aft placement of the mast on the boat. This aft mounted small mainsail area seems to be a trend in catamaran design because it makes sail handling "easier" for those majority of new buyers who prefer to sail under jib alone when they aren't motoring. As you can imagine, sailing this type of design with main alone will cause a lot of weather helm.

Catamaran rudders are not any different from any other spade rudder (I know I have been told otherwise, but it just isn't true). They are at minimal neutrally buoyant, and at max slightly buoyant. However, they are fitted in upper and lower bushings with lip seals. I have removed ours a couple times (on land) and getting them out of the tubes requires twisting and pulling to get them down out of their bushings and seals. It gets even more difficult once the post leaves the upper bearing and can cant in the tube. And this is with full gravity helping. I doubt attaching an anchor and chain would be enough unless someone went under and twisted the rudders also. I suspect they "popped up" when being worked on simply because of the force of water while hobby-horsing in the waves. They probably only moved an inch or so.

I wondered why they didn't remove the rudder stops to allow the bent rudder blade to rotate closer to the centerline. I don't know what their stop arrangement was, but this usually only requires either a wrench to undo some bolts, a knife to cut dynema line, or unhooking the crossbar.

I haven't gone elsewhere besides his blog to view comments. If people are getting nasty and calling into question the rescue itself, then that is silly and serious amateur armchair quarterbacking. I fault them for going out in the NA in January with an obviously untried and under-equipped boat, but it never occurred to me to question the chain of events, the attempts at overcoming problems or the decision to throw in the towel. If one was actually on the boat and found themselves in disagreement, that would be different - and the only circumstance under which the decisions made could be criticized.

I have been highly critical of Gregor Tarjan's over-the-top marketing hype. He must have been so blindly frothed up that he failed to understand how bad that report he posted was going to hurt him. For example, that "official insurance report" came within hours of the captain returning to land. It also contained phrases like (I'm paraphrasing here because I don't remember the exact words) "the Alpha 42 bows worked perfectly as designed" and "no other boat would have handled it like the Alpha 42". Does this sound like "insurance report" wording to you? Also, the blog entry on the Alpha site was changed before it was removed. Hyperbole like "massive 1.5" rudder stocks" got changed to simply "1.5" rudder stocks" - and all similar hyperbole was removed after the interwebs started laughing at it. Tarjan screwed the pooch with his spin on this one.

Mark