Alright, so this post starts on November 14th early in the morning for our haul out. As scheduled we got into the travel lift early in the morning, and very efficiently got hauled out. Lots of staff on hand, and very well organized for our haul out.
We got up in the slings, power washed to clean off the bottom which looked pretty good ultimately. A bit green but nothing too horrible after the last 6 months in the water with our VC Offshore bottom paint.
They then drove the boat over to our spot, and we got up on the boat and disconnected the steering and dropped the rudder while still in the slings. With the rudder out, we then got setup on jack stands and settled into our place on the hard.
Good news was the bottom rudder bushing looked just fine. Very little play in it. We took the top bushing out and assessed the situation. There was some play in the top bushing, but it did seem minimal when looking at it just on the shaft out of the boat. You could certainly move it back and forth with a bit of play, but it sure looked a lot less than it did when we were in big seas with it. It's possible we didn't really need to have it done just yet, but it wasn't going to be getting any better that is for sure, so I'm just as happy to get it done.
This is not an off the shelf part, so the yard had a guy that could fabricate the part for us. This ended up being pretty reasonable ($280). But it would take some time. We had hauled out on Thursday, Friday we got the part to the guy that was going to fabricate it, and he said it would be done for Monday. Someone picked up the part Monday night and we had it in hand first thing Tuesday to be installed.
Meanwhile we did have some time to kill while we waited for the part and over the weekend. Thankfully Zimmerman's did provide us a company truck to use while we were there, which was just super awesome for us. The yard at Holden Beach isn't really near very much, so having a vehicle was key. We were able to knock of a bunch of projects on the boat, laundry, dinners, provisioning, hair cut, etc. We even got out to a place for some tree top trekking on the weekend which was super fun. Ultimately probably one of the better possible stays you could have in a boat yard.
We had considered getting an Airbnb or something like that for our time there, but it was going to be pretty expensive and with the yard being so accommodating it didn't make much sense.
Anyways, that brings us to Tuesday. With our new part in hand, we checked it out, fit nice and snugly on the rudder. The guys at the yard got the boat up in the slings so we could re-install the rudder. Went in pretty smoothly and all was looking good, until I realized I had missed putting on the rudder stuffing box top ring (needs to be installed over the rudder shaft), and so I had to have them drop the rudder one last time to put that back on, and then reinstall the bushing. With that, it was just a matter of putting the steering quadrant back on and tensioning up the steering. Things were looking good, and we were able to get back in the water that day at high tide around 11am.
Everything was looking good, we motored out of the slings and into a slip to finish tidying up the boat which was in chaos of boat projects with the entire cockpit locker emptied all over the boat. We got everything cleaned up, and settled up our bill (under the quoted amount!),
Our stay at Zimmerman's was great. They were super accommodating, had us in and out as quickly as possible, and were not only willing to deal with our kind of esoteric boat (not just a part you can order), but they got it fabbed for us quickly and reasonably priced to boot. Very very happy with our experience here.
And with that we were ready to be under way. We were a little unprepared for the "everything goes perfectly smooth" scenario, so we didn't even really know where we planning to make it too or anything, but we pushed off and figured that out underway. Our next reasonable stop looked like a little anchorage at Little River Inlet. We made our way down there pretty easily, only about 20NM. Felt a little weird to be out floating on the water again, but also super nice to be back underway. Also this little hop puts us right on the border between North and South Carolina which is neat. Beautiful little anchorage with the roar of the atlantic just outside. I'm hoping we get back to some ocean sailing soon now that our rudder issue is fixed, but 35 knot gusts with considerable waves are predicted for the next couple of days so we'll stick to the ICW just yet.
