Well, I got my first taste of what sal****er and
twenty years can do to a boat today. The manager
of the marina where we keep our Irwin 38 called
and said that they had found a rudder floating in
the marina and were 99% sure that it was ours!

Four hours later I was looking at a beautiful
looking rudder with great bottom paint which also
had a broken place where the shaft used to be.
The shaft used to be a piece of 2-3/4" OD aluminum
pipe with a wall thickness of about 1/4", but it
had corroded completely through such that there
was almost no shiny metal left where it broke.

Tonight I'll spend the night on the boat, and
tomorrow morning I'll remove the rest of the shaft
from the control horn before starting repairs.

Now that I'm over the initial shock, the repairs
are starting to look doable. The marina manager
assured me that it is a fairly easy repair that he
has had to do several times on different boats
that he has owned. We'll see...

to be continued...