Our repaired rudder works well, but we cannot risk to take it offshore. It’s obious that we cannot just buy a new one and we have to produce it…
After one and holf week waiting in Wilmington George finally arrives. We take both our rudders (yes, catamaran has two) and go to a local wood store run just by women. After one hour of looking at different kinds of wood we decide to use marine plywood. They advise us a company which can produce the rudders on a CNC machine – which means the rudders will be exactly the same. We are done here, they will know the price on the next day…
George takes us to interesting restaurant – you can put to a bowl whatever you want (vegetables, muchrooms, meat, …) and the will grill it in front of you with rice or noodles and a sauce you want (available are more than 15 different ones). The food is tasty, healthy and cheap.
The next day the let us know the price for the rudders and that it will take 1 week to produce – more waiting again! We hate already “waiting” but this is the reality of sailing – you cannot have exact time schedule.
We use this time to walk in the city, playing frisbee, we help Goerge with his house and grill steaks at his backyard (our first meat during the sailing). We visit a civil war museum and a great aquarium full of fishes, jellyfish, seahorses, turtles, snakes, alligators and other animals which we don’t know names for. It was great that we could touch some of them (shark, ray, …) . Goerge made this waiting week great for us!
Phone call – rudders are ready. We buy rasin, cloth, screws and other needed things and pick up the masterpiece rudders – really a piece of arte created by the layers in plywood.
George takes us to another 7dollar all-you-can-eat restaurant. We cannot move 2 hours after we needed to taste all of the food there :)
Next days we are making the glassfiber work and Evit makes also new tillers from the rest of the plywood. Processing of plywood is really a meditation and art – to uncover the layers seeing it make nice texture shapes.
Finished! We put the rudders on Dove again and realise on of them is not exactly correct and needs to be adjusted. We repair the motor and install autopilot in meantime.
We also make a good dinner for Thanksgiving – this tradition is inspired by Pilgrims who first came to America, they were hungry but found piled corn – they were very happy and thanked God for this miracle (truth is that this corn belonged to the native indians and the pilgrims just stole it).
We take part on a knowledge game Trivian in an Irish pub with George’s friends Larry and Anet and we win a bottle of a good wine. We are then invited to dinner to Larry the next day to drink the wine. Larry is a clock mechanic and repairs old watches and explains us the basics of this interesting field.
We make a big shopping, fill the water tanks, get fuel and FINALLY sail again…
One more time a big thanks to George for all his hospitality and help and to Larry and Anet for their company and great dinner!
Some photos of the rudders are in our Wilmington album.