Yup Phyllis Nickles & John Harries of Morgans Cloud (LINK) have over 100k high latitude nautical miles on a Harken furler. John was bestowing it's robust nature and flawless performance to me on the dock this past September as they prepared for another off shore jaunt.
The rudder post on your C-30 is hollow stainless pipe. Most boats built for off shore work have solid rudder posts...
It is probably welded to the a steel web, much like the one shown in Maine Sail's second photo, and it is an integral part of the rudder. To replace it would require ripping the rudder blade apart and removing the tube, and replacing the tube... basically—rebuilding the rudder.
It was probably weeping rust.
Once the steel starts to rust, it expands about 10% causing the fiberglass and foam around it to break apart in small cracks from the pressure of the steel-to-rust expansion. More water gets in through the cracks and damaged laminate, causing more crevice corrosion, leading to more expansion...and so on.
Yes, that's why traditional blue water boats have either a keel hung or skeg hung rudder. They're much less likely to be damaged in an impact since they are supported both top and bottom or in the case of a partial skeg, halfway or two-thirds of the way down, versus only at the top.
A bridgedeck is a raised section at the front of the cockpit that reduces the risk of downflooding from the cockpit into the cabin should the boat get pooped. It is usually equal or slightly higher than the cockpit seats and transom coaming of the cockpit. If the cockpit fills with water, as would happen when the boat is pooped by a following sea, the bridgedeck would prevent most of this water from draining into the cabin—giving the cockpit drains a chance to direct the water overboard.
I'm not a fan of spade rudders on sailboats for other reasons but I like them structurally and use them almost exclusively on my power boat designs. It takes only a small increase in diameter to make them as strong as most skeg hung rudders. What I like is that they can hit something, bend the stock, and still have a good chance of being functional. Often, a skeg will flex enough that the stock can bend and the rudder will then be bound up. If you damage the rudder in some far away place, you can also remove and repair or replace a spade rudder much more easily than a skeg hung one. You may even be able to do it in the water.
They didn't! They noticed some pretty drastic galvanic corrosion on the un-rusted part of the shaft, you can actually see it in the photos, and decided to rebuild the rudder based on what they could see not what they couldn't. It is interesting that this rudder seemed to show dry on the survey. It will be fairly tough to find any rudder that has a stainless or aluminum stock that does not leak at some point as the expansion and contraction and loading of the rudder can do numbers on the seal between the glass and the stock. There have been very few failures of C-30 rudders, that I have heard of, but most are not sailing them off shore in 35+ knots, in December.....
