The picture above is of Chris hack-sawing through our 1.5" solid stainless steel drive shaft. Unfortunately, we were unable to pull the shaft from the coupling, so ching, ching (that's a cash register), we get to add that our parts purchase list. Once we had the shaft, strut and other various/asunder parts of the drive train out, we loaded up for a trip to Clearwater, Florida. Caliber Yachts, the builder of LaLeLu, still builds our same boat in their factory in Clearwater. In fact, the very mold our hull was laid up in is still in use!! It was like getting to see our boat's womb - very cool. We met with George McCreary, the head honcho of Caliber, and had him look at our parts. He came up with the official theory #3 as to why our boat failed: He believes that the prop was too heavy for the strut/shaft length, which caused it to stress fracture and break. So now we have three theories: 1. Prop blade broke and then caused strut to fail; 2) electrolysis caused strut to fail and 3) weight of prop caused strut to fail. Sooooo, we may never know what really happened - I suppose it could even have been a combo of things. We decided the best thing to do was to go back to square one - return the drive train to its original design. We are going to go back to the original fixed blade prop. George said that the prop/shaft were tested and designed for the type and weight of the original prop. Changing the prop and or shortening the shaft is tampering with the unknown. We are now 3 weeks post breakdown and probably at least another month from being back in the water - maybe more. Arrggggg!
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