Thanks. "sail sfbay". A long, error filled, boatnicks, but hopefully someday funny story with this that has presented me a couple of other problems. The cable broke, or I first noticed it, while trailering the boat into the water. We floated the boat noticed the broken cable, tried re-trailering the boat and the keel / centerboard missed the trailer pad that it rests on (which is a pet peeve with this boat / trailer; I wish that pad was even 4 inches wider or there was less side to side play resting the hull onto it's two side pads! (a digression)). Normally, if that happens occasionally, with your centerboard retracted you can just refloat and re-center the boat. No big deal. But now the centerboard is hanging free, scraping the boat ramp and I'm stuck and monopolizing the ramp impeding others. Going backward, the centerboard is catching on the graded boat ramp and I would never be able to get the trailer deep enough to float the free centerboard over the back bar of the trailer anyway. Going forward, I'm scraping the centerboard on the ground. I actually wound up moving the boat forward incrementally, pulling the centerboard repeatedly over growing stacks of two-by-fours to push the centerboard marginally up, each time re-tightening a ratchet strap hooked to the trailer sides to support the new height of the board. It has to weigh in the 500lb range I would guess.
In the end, the centerboard is now neither all the way down of course, nor all the way up and I can't budge it further. If it was all the way up I could probably measure with a string the length from the fulling expanded piston to the board.
A it is, I can't myself even get to the stirrup fixture / bolt going into the centerboard that the cable attaches to in order to free it. Its too far down inside the surrounding hull structure to even see what the screw head is or get a socket in there. I may not, obviously, be the most mechanic person, but I can't see how you would even be able to replace this cable unless the centerboard was fully down. Could be wrong there so if anybody knows better, help!
So, to conclude, my repair plan was to buy a new cable, gently trailer the boat with its centerboard resting on a ratchet strap to the marina fortunately just across the street, call it their problem and hopefully write not too large of a check!
I can probably get close on the length just by putting the two pieces of the shredded cable end to end, but I'm not sure how precise this length needs to be or if an inch or two error one way or another really matters. I do have an email into Marlow Hunter technical support so we'll see if they respond as well.
And yes the centerboard / cable design looks like the diagram you posted. The small variation being that the cable does not go threw an eye hole on the centerboard itself as the diagram might imply, but goes through a stirrup fixture that attaches to the edge of board.
If anybody out there has a Hunter 216 or new 22 with a centerboard / cable system that sounds like mine and wants to measure it for me,
I'll send you the string and my thanks!
(Or of course, if there are any other idea, I'd warmly accept those as well).
