Owning a boat comes with many surprises! Some not good…

Ahh the boating life…Sipping a yummy drink while the sun sets off in the distance. Look to the right and you see palm trees swaying in the breeze…To the left and there’s a dolphin just barely breaching the water….It’s perfect! 

NOPE!

We all dream of that perfect moment with this boating thing but most realize it’s not all sundowners and bikinis! While there are amazing moments and adventure, sometimes the boating thing bites you in the butt. Remember when we got slapped with a $5000.00 bill to fix a throttle box before departing for the Bahamas? Kind of like that…And it happened again!

We’ve known for sometime that our starboard rudder bearing was in need of being replaced. Jeremiah found the issue (it had some wiggle in the upper section of the rudder) when we were at Crooked Island in the Bahamas, he spoke with the Antares factory about it through email. They both agreed that it could wait to be fixed due to the design of the rudder. It sits in a shoe on the bottom which hold the rudder in place, so while it had a little wiggle back and forth, it wasn’t going to fall off. 

While in Grenada we had someone come look at it, they recommended waiting until we hauled out to fix it. Just in case something goes wrong (something always does). In that case we’d be stuck wherever we were at the time. We had plans to haul out later in hurricane season…So we waited. After hauling out, we went to replace the starboard rudder bearing. Jeremiah thought it’d be a good idea to do the port side bearing at the same time so they could be replaced as a pair. The port seemed ok but why not just get a good set of bearing on both sides? So we pulled them both. 

Surprise!! When the upper port side bearing was removed the rudder stock (basically a stainless steel pipe that turns the rudder) fell to aft. It wasn’t sitting in the middle of the tube…It was bent somewhere. Ugh…

This isn’t something you can see or tell without taking it apart. We still couldn’t tell what was really going on so we had to remove the rudder from the boat. That meant another lift because the rudders come straight down. We lifted Calypso Friday and removed both rudders. The find? 

The starboard one looks ok, it was just the bearing causing the movement. The port does not look ok. It’s bent right above the rudder itself. Not only bent, it’s also cracked and has a big pit (hole, see photo and the arrow) where the stress occurred. It looks like the rudder hit something at some point. John never really took the boat out, so this has probably been there since the first owner…Who we’ve seen some pretty funky fixes from…So add it to the list, I guess. Let’s get this fixed!.

We emailed the factory this morning and asked to order a new rudder. Not sure of cost yet but they did mention that out could take 45 days to make…Jeremiah joked about them needing to climb a mountain to find the meteorite iron they needed in order to forge the steel needed (basically like why in the world will it take 45 days?!) but we’ve asked if there’s anyway to expedite that process. Waiting on a response now. 

So…We wait.