If you mean that white bit above your blue nav bar, that's the top of the underlying view (at least, in my app that's what it is).
My app uses UIViews that “fill their space", managed by a TabViewController. If I don't do anything to them in my code, they normally fill the space between the nav bar at the top of the screen and the tab bar at the bottom. However, in vertical-tab-bar modes on the Duo (and only on this device in this mode), the view starts at y=0, the top of the screen:
will layout CowViewController: top 0 height 58, window height 678
(And as you can see, its height is only 58 pixels, for no reason that I can immediately determine, as the tab bar's top is at Y=0, too. I wind up overriding my view's frame to fix this.)
Try setting your view's background color to something weird (like I did) to see if that's what's happening in your case, and setting the nav bar's background to a semitransparent color to be able to see through it.