They weren’t perched on the rudder the entire trip. The rudder was akin to a “balcony” to their “house.”
On November 2022, three men sneaked onto the rudder of a ship and secretly travelled from Nigeria to the Canary Islands.
It was a 4,000 kilometre (2500 mile) trip that took eleven days.
It sounds like an incredible story of how they were able to brave several days and nights just sitting out so close to the open water.
There is a bit of space up above the rudder where they were able to keep their food and water. They took shelter there when the waves got rough. This is likely how they spent the majority of the trip.
It’s really sort of a trunk, which in some ships is misused to transport drugs, like cocaine. As much as 100–300 kg of cocaine can be hidden in the trunk, depending on how big it is.
You can access this trunk from outside the ship, which is how the three men were able to get in.
The trunk has nothing in it; it’s a void space designed to accomodate the rudder so it can freely move from side to side when the ship is turning port or starboard (left or right, in a sense).
The space may be about 1.6 by 1.6 metres and with a height of about 2.5 metres (5 feet, 8 feet).
Example drawing of the structure arrangement
While it was great for storing their food and luggage and keeping warm from the water's cold, it would have been an uncomfortable fit for three men which explains why they were perched on the rudder for some length of the trip.
Despite the trunk being more of an enclosed space, there is an air pipe feeding oxygen into it. The purpose of the air pipe is to equalise pressure build-up in the rudder trunk when the sea’s rough. Of course the occasional stowaways have used this measure to get fresh air.
Stowaways and drugs use the rudder trunk as their cabin. The three guys made headlines because they got caught.
Two years before this, a 14-year-old boy went from Nigeria to Spain after lasting 15 days on a ship’s rudder.
A year after before, four guys bound for Brazil from Nigeria made lesser buzz.
One reported that they took turns sleeping in their trunk as it wasn't big enough for all of them.
This type of dangerous trip is hardly anything out of the ordinary.