In this study, to control the heading angle of a ship, which is constantly subjected to various internal and external disturbances during the voyage, an LADRC (linear active disturbance rejection control) design that focuses more on improving the disturbance removal performance was proposed. The speed rate of change of the ship’s heading angle due to the turn of the rudder angle was selected as a significant factor, and the nonlinear model of the ship’s maneuvering equation, including the steering gear, was treated as a total disturbance. It is the similar process with an LADRC design for the first-order transfer function model. At this time, the gains of the controller included in LADRC and the gains of the extended state observer were tuned to RCGAs (real-coded genetic algorithms) to minimize the integral time-weighted absolute error as an evaluation function. The simulation was performed by applying the proposed GA-LADRC controller to the heading angle control of the Mariner class vessel. In particular, it was confirmed that the proposed controller satisfactorily maintains and follows the set course even when the disturbances such as nonlinearity, modelling error, uncertainty and noise of the measurement sensor are considered.