Vibration in steering wheel shaft

My boat (Enzo with 400 hours) has started to vibrate in the steering column while pulling a surfer out of the hole. It does not matter if the rudder is turned or straight. It does not vibrate when there is no ballast in the boat but the engine does sound different than normal while surfing at 3000 rpm. We have not hit anything that in the water (that we felt anyway).

I greased the two rudder zerks and there was no change. If someone holds the steering wheel there is a little play on the rudder. Any issues there?

I looked at the prop and there was no visible damage.

Any ideas?

Yep sounds like your strut bearings are worn out causing slight play in the shaft which creates cavitation under heavy load

When I bent my prop this weekend. (Which looked 100% perfect) until I pulled it off and saw one entire blade out of alignment. It would cause the steering to vibrate bad but it was also shaking the entire boat sooo.

Just because it looks good does not really mean much the prop could still be bad.

I'm going to swap props this evening to hopefully rule that out. I will see if there is any play in the shaft at the same time.