The tanker was alongside in Las Palmas before anyone saw them.
It was the twenty eighth of November, 2022, and the ship had left Lagos eleven days earlier.
Three men came off the stern that afternoon with symptoms of dehydration and hypothermia.
They had not been inside the ship at any point.
They had been sitting on the rudder, outside the hull, in the open.
Nobody on board had any idea.
Five feet square and open to the sea
A rudder does not bolt onto the outside of a ship. It hangs from a steel shaft that passes up through the bottom of the hull into the steering gear.
The shaft needs a housing, and on a great many ships that housing is a vertical shaft of plating that the class rules allow to stand open to the sea. The watertight seal sits at the top of it, above the deepest load waterline, not at the bottom.
So the lower part is simply flooded to whatever level the ocean outside has reached.
One classification society describes the resulting void as roughly 5 feet square and about 8 feet tall, entered from sea level by climbing up into it from underneath, with a pipe to the deck so the pressure can equalize in heavy weather.
A man fits. That is the whole problem, and it is a design consequence rather than a defect.
Two feet of freeboard under their shoes
Ships leaving West Africa for Europe are usually empty, riding high, with the rudder sitting about a yard clear of the water.
A small boat can come alongside the stern in the dark and put somebody onto it. Fishermen do this for a fee.
What that buys is a painted steel shelf a few inches wide along the top of the blade, inside the shadow of the overhanging stern, directly above the propeller.
On this crossing the three men were out on the blade itself rather than tucked up inside the housing, hanging onto the metal with their feet a couple of feet above the Atlantic.
The duty officer at the rescue coordination center in Las Palmas said afterwards that the exposure there is worse than an inflatable boat, because the hazards stack. Thirst, cold, the chance of a wave taking somebody off, and a compartment that can flood without warning.
The manhole is inside a tank full of water
Here is why a careful crew still misses them.
The housing has no door. From inside the ship the only way into it is a manhole in the aft peak tank, and that tank is normally pressed up with ballast or fresh water when the ship is light.
Opening it means pumping out a tank and entering a confined space. Nobody does that at a berth in the hour before departure.
The insurers’ advice is therefore to look from outside, in a lifeboat or on a paint raft, before the lines come off, and to weld bars over the openings.
One club circulated that advice in 2001 and reissued it eleven years later.
The inspection has to happen from the water.
There is no other way to see.
77 incidents and 321 people in 14 months
The part that reframes all of this is how ordinary it has become.
A marine insurer’s loss data counts 81 incidents and 241 stowaways in one recent twelve month period, then 77 incidents and 321 people in the fourteen months after, with the largest single case running to 49 on one ship, in the way that a longer crossing or a held breath gets read as a freak event.
In that dataset the rudder is not one option among many. It is named as the most frequently identified hiding place of all, and the reason given is boarding from the water, which the data report states directly.
The honest limit is that these totals cover every hiding place together, so the rudder share is a ranking rather than a count.
It is common, not rare.
Six days from Abidjan and back aboard
The same pier has seen it repeatedly. Two young men off a container ship after six days, found lying on the blade unable to stand. Two more spotted by a pilot boat on the way in. Four taken off by a rescue launch after six days from Abidjan.
Almost all of them went back aboard the same ship. Spain declined to land several of the earlier groups at all, so the crews that found them carried them onward to Norway or to France and the operators arranged the return flights.
No documented case turned up of somebody dying on a rudder, and that is a statement about the record rather than about the risk, since anyone washed off in the first night would never be counted. One insurer puts it plainly, that a person found late is probably already lost, and the wire report on this arrival noted it was not the first.
The ship’s rudder is a structural part.
It has become a passenger deck.
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