The first trip of the year is generally the time you are going to discover a steering issue with your outboard engine, one that developed while your boat was sitting on a trailer for the winter.
Even those anglers that perform their scheduled maintenance religiously sometimes forget to maintain their steering system. With most systems, you don’t even think about it because you rarely have an issue. Your boat goes from steering perfectly, then out of the blue, you have a minor problem. Minor problems in steering systems don’t last very long. They quickly become major problems or catastrophic failures. The good news is that they can be avoided, or at the very least, easily fixed.
Your skiff or smaller bay boat probably has good, old-fashioned mechanical steering, unless you steer with a tiller. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It’s tried and true. You spin the wheel, which is connected to the helm box. The gears inside the helm box actuate the cable, where the end runs through the tilt tube of the outboard. You spin the wheel to start a starboard turn, and the cable end retracts. Turn it port and it lengthens, with the boat turning as the motor itself pivots. Eventually, it just gets harder to turn the wheel. The cable has begun to seize, either from age or hardened grease getting inside the cable jacket. Soon thereafter, the cable will completely seize, and your motor is stuck at the angle it was last positioned.
Other trouble
What many anglers don’t realize is that while the cable was seizing, it most likely destroyed your helm box at the same time. The gears were forced to work harder and harder to actuate the same turn that used to be simple, due to the increased resistance of the cable, and you can’t really restore them to their former glory. Even if you catch the problem quickly, there is probably still some damage there. When your mechanical steering quits, the failsafe best way to fix it is to replace the helm and the cable at the same time, starting fresh with the new equipment. At this point, your boat should steer as good as the first day you ever took it out. Mechanical steering is far less expensive than hydraulic steering, and that’s good news.
Hydraulic steering is a different beast entirely. When everything is intact and set up right, steering your boat is a dream come true. When turning the wheel leads to some pops and shaking, then you are in the process of losing hydraulic fluid. When all the fluid is lost, you have no steering. The wheel will spin freely, but the motor (or motors) won’t turn at all. If you have multiple engines you can steer with your throttles, which can be a bit daunting. If you have a single engine, it’s time to start steering with the trim tabs.
Capt. Derek Treffinger at Fully Loaded Marine said he does the vast majority of his hydraulic steering repairs, especially on the very common legacy SeaStar hydraulic systems, this time of year. He says that “old and cold” is what causes seals to fail, and they generally fail at the end of the rams that go through the outboard, rather than at the helm. A chilly morning, an older seal in the ram, and a little pressure from a turn are often all that is needed to completely empty the system of fluid. He recommends his customers never leave the dock without a fill kit and a spare quart of hydraulic fluid. Even if you have a sizeable leak, you can still fill the system at the helm and get enough pressure to regain some steerage, just to get home. If you have a second set of hands and some wrenches on the boat, you can have your friend work the bleeder valves on the ram itself to get the air out as you draw the fluid in to the system, just like bleeding the brakes on your truck.
Check it now
Derek went on to say that a lot of boat manufacturers don’t equip their twin engine boats with enough hydraulic steering power to begin with, when they use a single ram and a tie bar. This setup became popular (and less expensive to install) when boats were using two-stroke motors. But the additional weight of four-strokes means that more steering power is necessary. He believes seals last a lot longer when the rams don’t have to push as hard, and he’s a fan of each motor having its own ram. Of course, this requires a lot more bleeding to get air out of the lines if or when a failure does occur. But in theory, these steering failures should be much less frequent this way.
Like everything else in the fishing and marine world, steering is evolving, too. Most of your newer, higher horsepower engines now have steering integrated into each unit at the factory, with many of them using larger power steering pumps to handle even more weight. For a while, at least, a lot of the steering problems that arise with these motors are going to have to be handled at a marine dealership. Each motor has its own independent steering system, though? No additional hydraulic lines to run from the console to the transom? I’m starting to like the sound of that a lot.
In the meantime, check out your steering for just a bit before your first trip this year. It might be the difference between a fun and productive early spring trip and a tow home. No one likes being towed in.
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