This could have sunk Nami. That's the first thing that crossed my mind as I cut back the first few inches of fiberglass from the top of our rudder.
A few months earlier, while installing our new electric motor, an entirely different saga, we made a pretty critical mistake. During the mounting process with countless boatwakes slapping the hull of our boat, we misjudged the positioning of the motor and ended up driving the propeller straight into our rudder. Yeah… not our finest moment. But you try repowering a sailboat from diesel to electric while living on the hook and tell me how it goes.
We patched the dime-sized hole with some underwater epoxy and kept moving. At the time, it felt like one of those problems you can push down the road, something to deal with later. The plan was simple: limp it along, make our way down to Guatemala, haul out, and properly deal with whatever damage we had caused plus the countless other boat projects Kirsten and I had to deal with. But deep down, I had a feeling. You know the kind of project I'm talking about, the ones that look small on the surface, but once you start digging, they completely take over your life. The kind where every layer you peel back reveals something worse underneath. This had all the signs of being one of those. And it was.
Let's fast forward a few months.
It's now August, and we've just spent our first few days living on anchor in the beautiful Rio Dulce. After 9 days at sea to get here, things finally felt calm. Still water, jungle all around us, and for the first time in a while, it felt like we could really relax. But haul-out day was coming up fast. Faster than most people around us thought made sense. Other cruisers kept asking why we were hauling out so early when we had the entire hurricane season ahead of us to get work done. From the outside, it probably looked like we were rushing into the yard for no reason.
But I couldn't shake the feeling. I kept telling people the same thing. That this rudder project was not going to be as simple as drilling a couple holes and letting the water drain out. But at that time that was the plan… at least on paper. Drill a hole at the top. Drill a hole at the bottom. Let whatever seawater had made its way inside drain out. Patch it properly. Move on. Simple. But nothing is ever simple when it comes to sailboats.
You see, our rudder is made of solid fiberglass. We've learned this during past haul outs. And in theory, that's a good thing. Solid fiberglass rudders are simple. No hidden voids, no trapped water, heavy, yes, but straightforward and reliable. At least, that's what we thought.
Most modern rudders are built very differently. They're typically constructed as a fiberglass sandwich, two outer fiberglass skins wrapped around a foam core, all tied together with an internal metal framework for strength. There are a lot of advantages to that approach:
- Weight savings often half the weight (or less) than solid glass
- Improved stiffness when engineered properly
- Better hydrodynamic shaping
But there's a tradeoff. If water gets inside… it doesn't just sit there. It spreads. The foam absorbs it. The structure traps it. And over time, it can compromise the entire rudder from the inside out.
So heading into this haul-out, we had a pretty simple expectation:
- Either confirm it's solid fiberglass and dry it out
- Or deal with some minor water intrusion and patch it properly
But there was one thing we didn't know yet. And it was about to change everything.
Hauling out in the Rio Dulce
Hauling out in the Rio Dulce is a little different than hauling out in the States. Most boatyards back home use the kind of equipment we're all familiar with: travel lifts. Big machines that pick boats straight out of the water using wide slings powered by diesel and hydraulics. It's a system that feels predictable. That wasn't the case at Nanajuana Marina.
As we motored into the slip that morning to haul Nami out, we were met with something completely different, a tractor rolling down the yard, towing a large hydraulic trailer behind it. Not exactly what we were expecting. To be honest, neither of us had ever seen anything like it before.
But in places like the Rio Dulce, where hundreds of boats haul in and out every year, different doesn't mean sketchy. These guys do this every single day. They know exactly what they're doing. Edgar, the yard manager at Nanajuana, greeted us with a quick good morning and immediately got to work. Within minutes, one of his crew was in the water, swimming beneath the boat. His job was simple, but critical. He began tapping along the hull, locating the bulkheads, the structural walls inside the boat that are bonded to the hull and deck. These are the strongest points on the boat, and they're exactly where the weight needs to be supported during the lift. If you miss those points, things can go wrong fast. The hull can flex. It can deform. And in worst-case scenarios, the lifting pads can even punch through the hull. Not something you want to risk. Within minutes, he had the cradle positioned perfectly beneath us. Everything was lined up. We shut the boat down, grabbed what we needed, and hopped off Nami into Hank, our dinghy, heading over to the dock to watch the haul-out from a safe distance. We already knew we'd be on the hard for a few months, so we made the call to leave the dinghy in the water. That's actually pretty common here in the Rio Dulce, because life on the river doesn't really work without a boat. Getting around by water is just part of daily life. There are public docks everywhere, at restaurants, grocery stores, even outside the local dive bars. In a lot of ways, it's more common to have a boat than a car here.
The moment the drill punched through
As soon as the boat was set into its stands, Kirsten and I got straight to work.
She headed topside to start measuring for a sail bag for our mainsail, a project we'd been wanting to tackle for a while. These are becoming more and more common on cruising boats. The bag, usually made from Sunbrella or a similar UV-resistant material, wraps around the boom and is supported by lazy jacks that run up to blocks near the spreaders on the mast. This bag not only protects our mainsail from the sun but also acts as easy storage for the sail when it isn't in use. While she started planning that out, I grabbed a respirator, a drill, a grinder, and went straight for the rudder.
Kirsten's finished sail bag
The moment the drill punched through and I pulled it back out, a stream of foul, stagnant water shot straight out of the fiberglass and into my chest. Disappointing yes, but not surprising. We had already suspected the rudder was holding water ever since we hit it with the prop a few months earlier. Still, seeing it pour out like that confirmed it, this thing was saturated. I drilled a few more holes in different spots, just to make sure there weren't any isolated pockets of trapped seawater.
Next came the grinder. While we were back in the States, we had picked up a new folding propeller. One of my main goals during this haul-out was to cut away part of the rudder to make room for it. The upgrade would significantly improve our efficiency under sail, something I'll get into more in Part 2 when we dive into the technical side of this build. But first, we had to make space for it. As I started to cut a line down the center of the rudder, our new yard neighbors walked by, wide-eyed, clearly trying to process why someone would willingly cut a massive hole into something as critical as a rudder. Well I guess that's a fair question. I kept cutting, stopping here and there to chat, but it didn't take long to realize this wasn't going to be quick. In some sections, the rudder was nearly three inches thick, and it was solid fiberglass. Dense. Tough. Not exactly grinder-friendly. If I wanted to make a clean, controlled cut, this wasn't the way to do it. The rudder needed to come off.
The rudder drop
There are really only two ways to remove a rudder like ours. The first option is to dig a hole deep enough beneath the boat so the rudder shaft has room to slide out downward. The second is to lift the boat high enough off the ground to drop the rudder out from underneath. At Nanajuana, that decision was made for us. Our boat was sitting on solid concrete. No digging was going to be possible. So if the rudder was coming out, the entire boat was going up.
The morning of the rudder drop came fast. After talking everything through with Kirsten, Edgar, and his crew, it was time to act. The plan was simple: Kirsten and I would get there early, disconnect all the steering gear from the rudder shaft, and make sure the rudder shoe was ready to come off so the whole thing could slide down cleanly. Rudders wearing shoes? Yeah, you read that right. A rudder shoe is a small but critical piece of metal that supports the bottom of the rudder. On older boats, like Nami, the rudder is supported at both the top and bottom, which makes it significantly stronger than modern spade rudders. The downside? More parts. More friction. More things that can get stuck. And in our case, the shoe had been glassed over at some point in the past, which meant hours of cutting and grinding just to expose it. Luckily, we had already done all that prep work ahead of time.
Back to the plan. Edgar was scheduled to arrive about an hour before lunch. The idea was to lift the boat before the crew broke for food, so if anything went wrong, we'd still have time, and manpower, to deal with it. Of course, things didn't go exactly to plan.
As soon as Edgar arrived, he asked if everything was ready and how high we needed to go. I guessed at least six feet higher than where we were sitting in the stands. Our rudder shaft runs all the way up through the boat into the cockpit, where we can mount an emergency tiller. It's long, and it needed clearance. He gave the nod, and the lift began. Slowly, Nami rose up off her stands. Everything looked smooth. We reached the height we needed, knocked off the rudder shoe, and positioned Kirsten inside the boat to watch the shaft from above. Her job was to keep an eye out for anything binding or catching as we lowered it. Then we started dropping the rudder.
At first, it moved. Then it stopped. That's when it became obvious. The prop shaft was directly in the way. I just stood there for a second, staring at it. "What a terrible design," I said to Edgar, half laughing, half trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do next. We thought removing the propeller might give us enough clearance. It didn't, because of the angle the rudder shaft entered the boat, the prop shaft was still blocking the path. So the next logical step? Remove the prop shaft.
If you've never dealt with a prop shaft before, it sounds easy. It's not. On older boats like ours, removing the shaft can take hours, sometimes days. The coupling that connects the shaft to the engine is often seized in place from years of corrosion. And once that coupling is stuck, you're in for a fight. I told Edgar we should raise the rudder back into position, throw a block under it, and then they should go ahead and break for lunch while I tried to get the shaft out. He looked at me like I was overly optimistic. Fair enough. But what he didn't know was that we'd been here before. Back in Key West, I had to cut the old coupling in half just to get it off. That whole nightmare had taught me exactly what I was up against. So I grabbed a ladder, climbed back aboard Nami, still sitting in the cradle, and got to work. A few curse words and stubborn turns of a wrench later, and finally the coupling broke free of the motor. I slid the shaft forward, grabbed a mallet, and after a few aggressive hits, the coupling popped off the shaft completely. Just like that. All those hours spent fighting it in Key West were paying off.
By the time Edgar and the crew got back from lunch, everything was ready. Nothing else was in the way stopping this rudder from dropping. With a bit of teamwork, we wrestled the rudder down and out from under Nami, laying it gently onto a few pieces of wood. For the first time, we could really see it. I walked over to inspect where the shaft entered the fiberglass. And my stomach dropped. Crevice corrosion. Not the kind you sand off and forget about. This was deep and far spread. Almost an eighth inch was eaten into the shaft and traveled far underneath what the outer fiberglass hid. That was the moment it hit me. Our shaft could've easily snapped in half and left us in the middle of the ocean unable to steer the boat. Shit, this could've sunk Nami. This wasn't just a quick repair anymore. This project was going to take time and thoughtful planning. You know the kind of project I'm talking about, the ones that look small on the surface, but once you start digging, they completely take over your life.
The crevice corrosion on the rudder shaft
Part 2 coming soon.