Pulled the boat on Friday night and took her home.

No signs of any damage on the outside. Can't duplicate the knocking noise on the hose.

Tomorrow morning I am taking it over to an OSO friend's shop so he can pull the drives and see what's going on inside.

I used to pull my own alphas but these cobras are too freaking heavy. Can't use a hoist because of the swim deck.

Odd.

U joints were a little dry but no big deal.

Everything looked fine. No obvious signs of gimbal or u joint failure.

Putting the drives back on and gonna go try to break it again.

Starting to wonder if the knocking/loss of reverse was the R not fully going into gear due to cable stretch. Had to adjust it a little at the end of the season last year. I was backing up at the time but there was also a wicked current... so I am wondering if the current was backing me up instead of the drive.

We shall see.

With my single 29' and a big prop, I can forget about backing up across a current or a wind. At best it will go straight regardless of steering.

I imagine you'd get the same effect with a twin in a strong enough current.

Good luck

Fund Razor,

You were messing around the engines when replacing the manifolds. Make sure the steering didn't work itself loose.

I was trying to go really slow so only SB was engaged. Port was in N. It was the combination of the knocking/ticking and the loss of steering input response that got me thinking gimbal.

Good point.

I inspected the steering pretty closely before I took the boat over to Tizbad. Looked ok. Tiller was intact and connected to the steering ram. Have full steering movement on trailer.

I will go over it again when I pick up the boat.

My plan is to stick it in the slip and take increasingly longer shake downs until I am satisfied that it's ok.

You may want to try running the boat on the trailer and tilted to the angle it is in the water. If it was knocking all the time in the water and not on the trailer, could be something lose swinging onto a spinning driveshaft while at an angle.

I tried that. I tried it in the water too.

Back at my dock I couldn't get it to act up again, but I don't believe in spontaneous boat healing. So I pulled her for a closer look.

Another friend made a good point that since the moment it happened I was focused on regaining control and not hitting a jetty in close quarters... maybe my brain wasn't in the best troubleshooting mode.

Right now I am leaning toward shift cable stretch as the cause of the noise. Especially since the drives have been pulled and all gimbals and u joints closely inpected for wear and failure and none found. The u joints did need lube.

I am gonna take another close look at the steering linkage and proceed with caution. My slip is 100 feet from a hoist down the same dock. If I have to... I could recover the boat on a hand line. So... I am gonna launch her assuming that everything still is fine on the trailer.

Thanks for the input guys, I know that I had you taking wild guesses... but curiosity was killing me until I could pull the boat and the drives.