Aiming at the uncertainty problem caused by model uncertainties and external disturbances in actual control process of chaotic ship steering, this paper combined the adaptive control method with sliding mode control method, and also transferred the sign function to the first derivative of control input when designing the switching function, which eliminates the chattering problem in common sliding mode control method, so a single input adaptive sliding mode control method for chaotic ship steering control was proposed. The experiment results show that, compared with the traditional sliding mode control method, the proposed method has a good performance on chaotic ship steering control with model uncertainties and external disturbances, which provides a more reliable way for chaotic ship steering control.