Fixed and underway again

Tuesday, May 25

Alex tells the story of diagnosing and fixing the problem:

Yesterday as I was diving under the boat to replace the propeller I noticed the lower gudgeon on the rudder was bent and the pintle and rudder were almost 3/4 of an inch raised up from where they should be. As we were on the phone with Daniel from Torqeedo trying to figure out what might be wrong with the motor Dad and I banged on the pintle and got it halfway back down. This made the rudder shake less, but still shake. Curiously the motor was working just fine. At the time we thought there were now two problems, one with the motor and one with the rudder. We were all scratching our heads about this one. Did the motor somehow cause the shaking and the shaking caused the rudder to ride up in its hinges? Maybe if the splines sheered off the inside of the propeller, that would explain it. But upon inspection the prop was good as new. What caused the motor to not turn the propeller more then a little at 1000 watts of power while we were in distress yesterday? Still a mystery.

Torqeedo amazingly decided to overnight a new pod motor to us.
To address the rudder problem Sam gave us the part numbers, heroic friend Ricco got to Fisheries Supply before it closed, and I drove to seattle last night to get the new gudgeon.

Also last night, Dad woke in the middle of the night and realized two things - the first that the rudder riding up in the gudgeons was what caused the distressing shaking we experienced. And it made sense that as the throttle increased the shaking increased because of more pressure on the rudder. But at the time we had no idea there was anything wrong with the rudder.
The second thing he realized is that as he was watching me in the water and the boat drifting he most likely mis-read the throttle - thinking it was at 1000 watts but really he had it just at 100 watts. That would explain why I saw the prop spinning just a little, and the second time we did this why the boat was just barely moving at what we thought was 1000 watts.
I woke in the night wishing I had played with the throttle some myself and generally messed around with things a bit more before we called for the tow. But I was hypothermic and consoling my son and we were all shaken up by the boat’s shaking and rapidly drifting into shipping lanes and it was obvious there was some big problem.

So, in hindsight, we believe our trusty Torqeedo motor is and always was totally fine. And we cried wolf and ended up with an extra Torqeedo pod drive for nothing. (Which we will gladly return to Torqeedo after our trip assuming we don’t need it)
Oops!!

And still mega gratitude to Daniel and the folks at Torqeedo who went above and beyond to help us out of a mysterious yet distressing situation. We are so glad to know you have got our backs!

That brings us back to today. As soon as we got hauled out it was obvious the pintle was bent as well as the gudgeon. I kicked myself for not also getting a new pintle in Seattle yesterday. But the folks at the local boatyard hooked us up. They were too busy to do the work themselves, but they let us borrow tools. We torched and banged and viced and bent the pintle back to true. All the parts amazingly re-installed smoothly and we splashed down and got underway at 2:30. Currently 5:00 pm and going 6.5 knots with some favorable current and 2/3 sunshine and 1/3 battery power.
Talking to Sam again he said it is customary to have a rocky beginning to a long journey, so we got that right!