Sailing 'Our Hood 23' - Ep 6: "Centreplate"

If you are familiar with dingy sailing then you are familiar with using a centreboard, which is needed to sail effectively upwind. In yachts, the same role is normally performed by a weighted keel however in smaller trailer yachts there is a bit of a cross over and many also have retractable swing keels or centreplates. Our Hood 23 has a weighted keel of sorts but it's a shoal draft one (essentially the weight is in the bottom of the boat). It can be sailed without the centreplate but it performs significantly better upwind if it does have one installed. When we got ours although it came with a centreplate, it was not installed so from the outset our intention was to get a basic familiarity with the boat as it was and then install the centreplate. The previous owner kindly offered to assist with the installation.

Recently I had a 7 day holiday planned and instead of going away anywhere I chose to get the boat out of the water and do some work on it, including the installation of the centreplate. We some perserverence and creativity we got there in the end but as you'll see in this video, it wasn't without quite a few challenges along the way.

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