I much prefer steering boat under about 35ft with a tiller rather than a wheel. You can sit on the windward side and have a great view of the sails and approaching wind or waves. You get a much more direct feel for the rudder loads, which helps trim and speed. It's a much simpler system than a wheel, with very little to go wrong.

On a wide beam boat, like a catamaran, you sensibly need two tiller extensions or they are massively long, thus making them heavy and awkward to use. Having said that, it takes a while to get used to dropping one and picking up the other when tacking. A dinghy size is normally plenty strong enough, as this photo of my 30ft Sagitta shows, when sailing at around 7 knots.

Sagitta is 20ft wide, so definitely needs two extensions. It is also now 35 years old and has had a hard life. So parts are beginning to fail. Including the original telescopic tiller extensions. Mind you the telescoping hasn't worked for years, the sliding parts have been fixed tight at about 5ft6in (1.65m) length. Even so eventually one snapped in half, so time for two new ones!

I searched online and found that direct replacements now cost over GBP100 each!! So a rethink was needed. Suitable (un anodised) aluminium tubing for a fixed length extension worked out at GBP30 for both. Much more reasonable. But then I remembered that years ago we needed two extensions for a different catamaran and we used telescopic boat hooks with the hooks removed.

So I searched again and found a company selling 3-6ft telescopic boathooks for GBP15 each, delivered. So I bought them, they arrived two days later and, surprisingly, the hooks were separate as they are screwed into the tube. One less job to do.

So here they are, fitted to the boat. Hopefully they will last another 35 years!

The question remains though, how come marine grade telescopic boat hooks are only 20% of the cost of tiller extensions? After all, the design concept, amount of metal and manufacturing time must be the same.