What techniques do you all use to get yourself out of a rudder stall condition? I've had times where everything goes perfect and I've got full control and times that the boat just hooks around and broaches even though it seems like I've got decent speed and should have control. This is on 2 ft bay style waves. Could it be I need to get a little more speed on takeoff and get farther down the wave? I'm open for all discussion on this. Thanks

Hard to tell if it's out of the air. The wavelengths are close enough that it could be. I've had the boat broach on me before. This is probably best described as angleing down a wave and hitting the rudder to turn back straight and the boat basically just keeps on turning till it's parallell with the wave. It's very slow and not abrupt like a sudden broach. It feels like the rudder should be in the water at this time, hence I was calling it a stall. I've been wondering what the cause is and how to work on keeping it from happening.

That makes sense.Thanks. I'm probably just on the edge speedwise when I do this and just hitting the rudder probably makes the situation worse as it adds drag to the boat. Best to do like you said and angle straighter, gain the speed, then transfer over to the next wave while hitting the gas if needed. Reacting earlier to wave changes and anticipating changes is also something I've been working on but have yet to fully grasp.

My downwind paddling has lots of scope for improvement but let me add my 10c worth.

Firstly I don't think its just case of keeping your speed up.  The trick according to Oscar Chalupsky is to stay on the top of the run rather running down the face of it.  Its a case of power on early and stop paddling sooner.  If you stay on top of the run you will find that your rudder remains effective and the tendency to broach is greatly reduced.  Charging down the face of the run also means that you have lost the potential energy which will be helpful when you need to accelerate in order to link runs.

Of course its not always possible to stay on the crest of runs so you need to have techniques for steering on the face.  Leaning the ski offers highly effective steering on runs  but the technique takes a lot of getting used to the because the direction of turn is away from the lean.  Aside from being more effective leaning does not result in increased drag as in the case of a deflected rudder. 

You should have plenty of relative speed to the water to activate your rudder when surfing green water. The water is not moving except a bit  in a circular direction on a horizontal axis; the top in the direction of the wave. If the wave has broken, and you are surfing on whitewater, then you have little relative speed to activate your rudder unless in penetrates down into green water.

I agree with nell's first comment.  Your rudder isn't stalling, it's coming free out of the top of the wave.  The only way you could be stalling the rudder is if you put in full deflection on the pedal very quickly, like jamming the rudder full over at speed.  This isn't very likely.  When your rudder breaks free, the boat wants to broach because the crest of the wave is moving the back of the ski forwards while the trough is pulling the front of the ski back, thus yanking the hull out of line.

Short, steep waves are the cause.  That's why Epic moved the rudder forward a couple of inches on the V10L and why the straight elliptical rudder is better than a swept rudder - these serve to keep the rudder blade buried. 

One thing I've done when I can feel this happening is to tilt the boat away from the wave - like you're leaning towards the downhill face of the wave.  This seems to angle the rudder blade back into the wave a little.  Sometimes it saves a run, sometimes it don't.  The only other way to deal with it is to pull hard on the up-wave side and try to torque the hull back down the face with your body.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't.