Thumping centerboard question

[Gerard]

We have a '95 h26. We have plenty of water at our seasonal dock, so we keep the centerboard down all the time (per Dave Condon's advise). This past week we docked at a shallow dock and had to raise the board. The board seemed to clunk around a lot in it's housing. I don't remember this happening in the past, but we raise the board so rarely I'm not sure. We anchored out in a swell (ok, Great Lakes chop) of approx. 1-2 feet and checked it at different depths. It seems to clunk until it's about 2/3 - 3/4 of the way down. Is this normal?Thanks...

 

[Ron]

Snug It Up

My experience is that the board when down or partially down will clunk around in choppy water. It may help to make sure you snug it up very tightly in the full up position to stop some of the movement. This has helped our H26 when at anchor - but with board up, you get more swing at anchor. Good luck.

 

[Ray]

Gerard, on our 95 H26 we have heard the same

noise as recently as 2:30am last night. We always drop the hook when spending the night on shore by dropping the anchor about 100 feet out, then deploying the aft 100' lines to shore.The clunking noise has always been causes by the center board. Last night after pulling the anchor line tight I had the boat 4' out from shore with 1' clearence at the aft end.After knocking off for the night the wind picked up and the centerboard started banging. We had tightenend the board line as hard as we could by hand as we usually do.Because of the increase in the wind volosity and wave size we had to lower our centerboard and raise it again and used the winch to get a good lock.

 

[Rob]

Loosen it a little

Unless you are severly constrained by draft, I would loosen the board just a little. The reason for the "thunking" is the board rattling back