The past 6 weeks or so has been spent on figuring out the running gear for the boat. We know the engine will be the Yanmar 4JH 45 HP, but then what? New stern tube (moved aft), removed the strut, and designed a better system for pushing this boat through calms and steep seas during a storm.

It started when we realized you couldn’t remove the shaft from the boat – it hit the rudder skeg, which is not good if you need to fix or work on the shaft somewhere remote. Previously you would actually have to remove the engine, and then pull the shaft inside the boat, that’s crazy! In order to fix that we needed to remove the stern tube and strut, so about that time we also knew we wanted to move the engine and everything else aft. It’ll be great when it’s done, all things better, just a bunch of work.