There's an event called the Texas 200 that leaves from Port Isabel, TX and ends approximately 200 miles up the coast. It's primarily for small boats, mostly sailboats, but I believe the rules are few and vague (on purpose) so basically anyone can enter. It takes 4-5 days and was modeled after a race called the Everglades Challenge here in South FL, but there's no official racing involved. While it's not quite rounding the Cape, weather does get extreme at times. I'd like to do that some day but I need to gain experience and work on some of my skills first. Nice thing is I'm an hour from the ICW so practice doesn't put me out too much. I'd like to take a trip and beach or island camp each night, but Florida is so built up and touristy camping is not allowed on the beach and from what I've found there are few other places to camp. Even on a little boat, a cabin drastically expands your capabilities.
Over the week I was able to pick at things a bit more, and worked on fixing the rudder mounting. To fix it, you have to remove the rotted wood and replace it with structural filler, inject it with thinned penetrating epoxy, or a combination of both. The epoxy seals the rotted wood and turns it into a composite. To get the real bad wood out I took an allen wrench and chucked it in my drill. Then put it in the hole and hit go. The wrench turns around and loosens up the worst of the rotten wood near the holes so epoxy can be injected. On the inside I noticed the wrench turned very easily, too easily like there was nothing there. I figured the wood was completely gone, but then found the wood near the outside was solid. I thought it was weird that it would be more rotten on the inside than the outside so I opened up the inside holes so I could see what's going on.
These two holes are for #10 machine screws that go through the transom to hold gudgeon. After opening them up I could see there was no plywood behind those holes. On most boats I've seen the transom has a solid core with laminate on either side. However this boat appears to have plywood bonded to only the outside laminate. The inside slopes back slightly so there's nothing behind it on that side, especially near the bottom. That kind of explains why the bolts looked like they were going to pull through. The hollow space behind this leads directly down to the bilge where the drain is, so unless the boat was upside down penetrating epoxy wasn't going to work. Thickened epoxy it is then! There are products ready made for this purpose, but I couldn't find them locally. I wanted to get this done before the weekend as it is forecast to rain and I didn't want all the wood getting soaked as it would take forever to dry, so I made my own filler using the dust captured by my RO sander when working on the hull and some glass fiber I chopped up. It wasn't super fun to work with but it got the job done.
I removed the bilge plug drain a few weeks ago as it needed to be resealed anyway. I found a piece of 3/4" copper pipe fit perfectly there and prevents any stray filler from dropping down and plugging the drain path for bilge water.
I mixed up some epoxy and added my filler material, then set about shoving it in. Prior to this, I used some plumbing repair putty (also epoxy) to build a little "shelf" that would prevent my filler from sagging and/or running down. I really did not want to mess up bilge drainage as it would be a nightmare to access and fix any of that. The filler ended up working quite well, it didn't sag at all and the shelf probably wasn't even needed. The only trouble was it was hard to tool it and smooth it out due to the relatively long fibers. Commercial milled glass filler strands are very short but my homemade ones were all over the place. Not a huge deal as it can be sanded later.
Some cure time and a little sanding and this should be good to go.