Everglades Challenge 2025 Begins
Follow as we race to Key Largo in our Core Sound Cat Ketch Sailboats.
Tomorrow we will shove off from the beach at Fort Desoto Park in Tampa Bay Florida at 8:30am for the 25th Everglades Challenge. This week has been a familiar whirlwind of last minute prep we have done many times. After gathering clothes, boat food and battery powered gadgets and receiving a steady stream of Amazon deliveries we have once again arrived at the start of the EC. With any luck we will successfully navigate Carlita to the finish once more. Rather than send out race updates on this platform I am going to upload short video race updates to the B&B YouTube Channel as long as we have cell service so make sure you’re subscribed! I’ll add them to this playlist so check back after the race starts. We also have a photo album which I’ll be adding to as we go.
Below, walk along with me checking out all the boats on the beach this year. A favorite activity once your boat is squared away. This year we feel more prepared than usual.
For the hardcore fans you can track us on the watertribe tracker or on raceowl. Join the watertribe facebook group or follow the watertribe forum. There is also a thread on the Messing-About forum and the Sailing anarchy thread typically tracks the Class 4 and 5 boats pretty closely.
Carlita is ready to go and this year she has a new rudder. At last years Messabout she suffered some rudder cheek damage when Graham’s home made keel rollers on the trailer worked TOO WELL and she slid off the trailer way too fast. The rudder blade (with rudder up) slammed to the stop when it hit the water and twisted the rudder cheeks cracking them. We slapped some ply to the outside to get her back underway for Graham’s Neuse River Trip. You can see below the repaired rudder cheeks which while ugly were much stronger than original (thickness = stiffness). But for the EC we’ve rebuilding Carlita’s Rudder cheeks and rudder blade as the original was starting to get tired after a decade of sailing. Pictures of the rebuild are here.
For an more in depth look at the Core Sound 17 Mark 3 rudder check out this 4-5 min segment of our complete 17mk3 Tour video. In it I discuss my preferred downhaul setup which is critical for shallow water sailing.
On Rudder Failure:
This is only the second time I've seen a B&B rudder have a failure in the 17 years I’ve been working with Graham and sailing B&B boats and I still have yet to see one fail from actual sailing or grounding. The first was on Erik's 20mk3 rudder blade which technically failed while sailing but it was later determined that the blade was damaged earlier when an Amazon truck backed into it. And this recent failure which you could argue could be replicate in rough seas but Carlita has seen quite a bit of those without incident. Nevertheless we did decide to increase the cheeks to 9mm ply for the rebuild.
Rudder failure is one of the primary failure modes of small boats in the EC. Whenever I see a fancy new rudder design on the beach I think about all the rudders I’ve seen fail over the years. Broken pins, sheared blades, cracked castings, bent plates and on and on. Graham’s design has been brutally tested and passed over and over again.