Here's how Charlie described the damage initially, as reported by the owner's visual inspection after diving on the rudders:

...the starboard rudder blade was just spinning in place around its stock and that the port rudder blade was bent inward toward the boat’s centerline at a very large angle.

As the typical rudder construction I'm most familiar with involves length of the "rudder shaft" continuing through most of the chord depth of the rudder blade towards the bottom, seems that a bending of the "rudder blade" would likely involve some bending of the shaft inside the rudder...

Now, I suppose it's possible that the rudder shaft ends very close to the top of the rudder, and is attached to some sort of internal "frame" at that point... If that were the case, seems an incredibly piss-poor method of spade rudder design and construction, to me...

Seems to me the way to go for a rudder on an offshore boat, is to extend the shaft through the full depth of the rudder, no?

One other very odd thing about the description of the damage... Charlie says the port rudder was bent at a large angle INWARDS, toward the boat's centerline... Well, if the rudders were "locked hard over to port", one would expect if the damage occurred as a result of the boat being driven backwards, the expectation would be that it would have been bent in the OPPOSITE direction, no?

Curiouser and curiouser, indeed...