Sea Love Boat Works, Ponce Inlet, FL
There are several lessons to be learned from this part of our Journey.
- Sonar is your friend – we didn’t have it installed yet
- Take into account the swell when watching depth – a foot up and down is 2 feet off the charted depth
- Go with your gut – we should have just had a new rudder made – it would have been cheaper and quicker
Sea Love Boatworks decided to just rebuild the bottom of the rudder once we had the boat out of the water. I expected them to cut the rudder off square and carve a piece of foam core to shape and cover it with fiberglass. They chose to use heavily thickened epoxy filler and try to cover it with 7 or 8 applications, to fill in the bottom of the rudder. Then the plan was to sand it back some more and reskin the bottom of the rudder. Well as they sanded back further, we found stress cracks, that led to more sanding and more sanding and finally a complete new skin.
While I am fairly happy with the results (they could have faired it out cleaner) we are getting good performance out of it.
My issue is the time and cost associated with the repair because they tried to do it their way vs what I suggested. This delayed our departure to the Bahamas by most of a month unfortunately.