Here are some Malo rudder construction details.

All the ones I have seen so far are made the same way with a partial skeg and partially balanced rudder. A bronze shoe is secured to the bottom of the skeg. The other half is bolted on to the shoe's aft side, thus capturing the rudder shaft. Some of the rudder below the skeg is sacrificial in a bad collision with something. The first photo was taken at the Malo yard showing a boat under construction in 2002.

The second photo is a detail of my Malo 41 rudder assembly shortly after haul out for an insurance survey and bottom painting before our 2011 sail down the coast.

What's wrong with this picture? Two missing bolts!

Those bolts were fine when the boat was hauled in 2010. The bolts are stainless and the rest of the assembly is bronze.They had been secure and goobered with bottom paint since 2002. Looks like we should have re-torqued them regularly. The yard verified that the threads in the shoe were good and the missing bolts were replaced, this time using Loctite. Now I wonder if the yard did all six. Here's another example of why there's a benefit to doing the work yourself! The lost bolts were gone without a trace. We don't know if they vibrated free, corroded free, or someone made off with them on purpose. The first seems most likely to me.

Could this sort of problem have been the start of the failure that destroyed the Malo 45 in the Indian Ocean? Possibly. I know that our upper bearing and water seal were not designed to take the loads of a free-hung rudder in a seaway. Without that clamshell secure at the bottom of the skeg, we could have had a major problem on our hands off the California coast. Lucky we caught it when we did.

As part of our preps in 2011, we added a hull zinc and tied in the prop shaft, rudder, and engine. Prior to that, the rudder assembly had no galvanic protection, but was not in electrical contact with anything else on the boat.

Looks like, other Malo owners should take a good look at their lower shaft bearing.