high, dry, and under repair....from P

I always feel bad for Senara when she is up on the blocks. Kind of like visiting a loved one in the hospital. After our dispute with the sand bar at Ocean City, Senara required some serious invasive surgery in the rudder area (ouch!). The big decision was whether to remove the rudder and possibly replace it, or repair it in place. Removal would involve even deeper surgery including unbolting a steel flange from the keel area astern. The bolts have been sealed against the seawater since 1980 and are still not leaking. The opinions of knowledgeable people ran the gamut from "I would just epoxy the cracks and keep going" to "I would pull out the rudder, remove the flange and all the fittings and rebuild it all." As a big believer in the law of unintended consequences, my opinion did not include a desire to start cracking off 28 year old bolts in the hull that are currently showing no signs of leaking or instability. It looks like Tartan did a pretty good job back there when they built her. So we are repairing the rudder while it hangs in its place. No need to fix what ain't broke.

Capt'n Fred is handling the epoxy & fiberglass work (he also made an appearance very early in this blog site - February/March time frame). We decided to cut a large panel out of the starboard side of the rudder, scoop out the original foam core, repair and reinforce the fiberglass shell from the inside using epoxy, re-core the void using modern closed cell foam, replace the panel, epoxy the gaps, and fair it out. We got lucky. The rudder post is attached to the inside of the rudder by two large stainless steel tangs fiberglassed to the port side. We made our cut on the starboard side. We won the 50/50. So far, so good. The old foam core was saturated with seawater and was supporting a small colony of mussels and barnacles. No telling how many years the rudder had been leaking. We are making an extra effort to glass up all possible weak spots, cracks, and potential leaks. It is a long surgical process and we are not yet ready to pour the foam. But at this point I am feeling very good about the prognosis.

After making the cut and scooping out the old wet foam (left)

after applying the first layer of fiberglass and epoxy to shore up the attachment areas