I have a three year old Hobie 16 that I race a couple of times each year. Now to the problem, I have cracks on one of the rudders! The cracks are on both sides of the rudder.





I don't sail through the surf but race in heavy weather sometimes. I sail with one rudder on the upwind and did some high speed runs a couple of weekends ago, top speed 22.4 knots.

This is my third Hobie 16 and during my 20 years of Hobie sailing I haven't heard about rudders breaking (except for the cheap lexan rudders). Has anybody else on this forum broken a Hobie carbon rudder just by sailing with it?

I sanded away the paint and the cracks continued through the carbon fibre, f-ck! I took a pile of unidirectional carbon fibre and laminated with epoxy so it should be ok now.


/hakan

More pictures

More

Wow. I have not seen that before.

The rudder shown is a Hobie Cat Europe product that is not sold in the USA, Americas and Pacific Rim countries.

We have the EPO2 blades from Hobie Cat USA. Have never seen a problem with them.

I had the exact same thing happen to my Hobie Euro rudders.
My newer boat has Hobie US EPO2's and I havn't had any problems.

Was it a carbon rudder or the white euro rudder that you got cracks in? Did it break?

My other rudder is free from cracks so my guess is that this rudder was a bad sample from Hobie Europe.

/hakan

It was a carbon rudder and the damage was exactly as in the picture. I repaired it with epoxy before anything really bad happened.