Arrrrgh.

One of my projects this week has been installing new rudder lines on my three surfskis.  I think the general wisdom is that any surfski paddled regularly should have its lines changed once a year, so the boat I keep down on the riverfront was definitely due for new ones.  Meanwhile, my other two mostly just sit in storage in my garage, but when I took one of them down to Ocean Springs in March I noticed that one of its lines was getting pretty worn right at the rudder post.  So I decided to just change them out on all my boats and head into the summer with some peace of mind on this particular boat-maintenance issue.

The problem is that changing the rudder lines on a surfski is a monumental hassle.  No other task I can think of makes me want to scream impolite words at the top of my lungs like stringing rudder lines does.

The first challenge is to get the new line to feed through the tube inside the boat.  The best-case scenario is to have the old line still in place, because then you can just attach the end of the new line to the end of the old and pull it through.  But... you can't just tie them together, because the knot is too bulky to fit through the tube.  In the past I've used a little piece of electrical tape to join the ends, but you have to make a very neat, very thin tape joint so it will fit through the tube.  And then you have to pull it through very gently, lest the tape joint fail deep inside the boat.

This time around, my strategy has been to fray the end of each line, like so:

and then soak each end in G-flex epoxy resin, twist the two ends together, and let it cure overnight, with the intention of pulling it through the next day:

Each time, the epoxied joint has been too bulky to fit through the tube; so I have to whittle it down with a sharp knife or work on it with a piece of sandpaper.  One of the joints failed during this trimming process, and I had to glue the ends all over again.

(If you are not so fortunate as to have the old lines in place for pulling through the new lines, I know of a couple of things you can try.  One is to feed a stiff wire through the tube, and then use that to pull the new line through.  The challenge with this method attaching the line to the wire in a way that will fit through the tube.  Meanwhile, there are videos on You Tube that show the use of a vacuum cleaner to suck the line through the tube.  I've tried this a couple of times, and I seem to remember having success at least once but having more trouble other times.)

As of this writing I've been working on two of my three skis, and I've successfully installed two of the four new lines.  The other two have raised the frustration level of this project to a new height.  On Tuesday morning, while pulling on the old line to move the new line into place on one of the boats in my garage, the joint hit a snag inside the boat and broke.  Upon further inspection, I realized that the tube was broken inside the boat.  This was bad, because a surfski is a closed shell with no way to get inside short of taking a saw to it.

That is in fact what I ended up doing to my oldest ski when I found its tubes were broken a few years ago.  I hated to do it, but at least by that time the boat was getting old and beat-up and I was using it just for training anyway.  This photo shows what I did:

First I cut a circular hole in the deck aft of the seat bucket.  Peering through this hole, I found that the tubes were broken in many places and would have to be replaced entirely.  To do so, I would have to access the boat's insides closer to the footboard, and I ended up using a circular saw to make slits on either side of the seat.  After much painstaking work I got the new tubes in position and secured them in place, and then, by way of repairing the surgical damage I had done, I installed a hatch on the back deck (I ordered it from West Marine or some such supplier) and used Kevlar and fiberglass seam tape to patch the slits on either side of the seat.  The boat is now rather ugly and at least 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) heavier than it was when it was new, but like I said, it was already sort of beat-up anyway and relegated to training duty.  It has paddled just fine, and that's ultimately all that matters.

The broken tube I discovered Tuesday morning causes me more anguish, because even though I've had this boat eight years, it still feels new to me because I've mostly kept it in the garage and gotten it out only for races.  I was so infuriated by it all that I had to walk away from it and go down to the river to paddle (the whole point of all this work, after all).

I took the other boat from my garage--the one I hadn't messed up yet--down to the river with me because I wanted to bring my training boat back home so I could replace its rudder lines.  The boat I was taking down there happened to be the most stable one I own (V10 Sport), and that was a good thing because there was a strong south wind blowing and there were some pretty legitimate downwind conditions out on the Mississippi.  They weren't epic like the Miller's Run or the Columbia Gorge, but they were more than adequate for practice in reading conditions and linking runs.  And they were ideal for the mood I was in: infuriated with the awful turn my rudder-line-replacement project had taken, I needed to do lots and lots of hard sprints until I was too exhausted to feel angry anymore.  And that's what I did.

I brought the other boat home from the river and spent some time working on it yesterday.  I got one new line strung, but had that glue bond fail on the other one like I mentioned above.

This morning I returned to the river.  Some heavy thunderstorms had moved through overnight, part of the same system that spawned deadly tornados farther east in Tennessee.  By the time I got down to the dock the sun had come out and there was a mild breeze blowing from the northwest.  There would be no downwinding today, but I paddled the V10 Sport out onto the river hoping maybe there would be some barge wakes to ride.  But the river was free of traffic, so I just paddled for 60 minutes, working hard on hip rotation.  With a more stable boat under me I felt comfortable rotating hard out on the river, so much so that my whole pelvic area was quite tired by the time I was finished.

This afternoon I went down to the shop to work on my training boat's other rudder line.  I was expecting this task to be the smoothest yet; after all, should anything go wrong I have access to this boat's innards through that hatch I installed a few years ago.  I shaved down the glue joint so that it would fit through the tube, and began pulling.  The line hit a snag, so I opened the hatch to investigate... and discovered that the tube had broken up into many fragments.  This is a tube that was new just a few years ago.  The only thing I can figure is that when a boat lives outdoors year-round, the tube material can't withstand the constant fluctuation in temperature, with the freezing and thawing and all that.

I'll have to install a new tube, and that'll probably mean taking the circular saw to the edge of the seat bucket again to get the tube properly situated there.

Or...

Maybe it's time to retire this old boat.  Fifteen years is a long life for just about any canoe or kayak, and I've certainly invested a good bit of money and many hours of labor to keep this one going for this long.  It's seen me through hundreds of days of training and exploring, and it feels like an old friend, but perhaps the time has come to take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.  Sigh.

That would leave me with the V10 Sport that's currently down at the dock (the state of whose insides I have yet to explore), and that other boat in the garage (a V10L) that also has a broken tube.  In that boat I'm pretty sure there's just one break near the stern, and I'm hopeful that I can cut a smaller hole, run the rudder line across the break, and repair the hole with a smaller hatch.

Anyway... what a week I've had, all because of what at first glance looks like some simple routine maintenance.  And yes, I do have sort of an issue with the manufacturer of these boats regarding the durability, accessibility, and repairability of their interior parts, but I'll save that rant for some future post.

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