Stiff Helm

One of the original goals of our first haul-out was to investigate and fix the stiffness of the helm. To try to isolate the problem, we disconnected the steering quadrant from the rudder post, and used the emergency tiller to turn the rudder (it was still incredibly stiff).

TODO: add picture here

Our hypothesis was that the grease someone had put in the stuffing box had degraded and become tar-like. After opening the top of the rudder’s stuffing box, we realized the best way to remove and clean the material would be to drop the rudder out of the boat, so that we could have better access to it. However, we couldn’t figure out how to properly remove the rudder, so we asked the boatyard to take a look, which they did this morning.

It turns out that the gudgeon (the fitting on the bottom of the skeg where the rudder post lives) is a brass piece, covered by fiberglass at the bottom of the skeg. The fitting underneath this is likely press-fit into place. The yard quoted us 40 hours of fiberglass work to drop the rudder and re-attach it, a cost we were not willing to pay. So for now, we will live with a stiff helm.

We do plan to address this in the future - we can get packing material extractors to remove the existing material in the stuffing box without dropping the rudder, and we can replace it with a stuffing material called GFO (some sort of lubricated kevlar). We will likely need to wait until our next haul-out to do this work.