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Hi Dennis,

Prop walk in reverse to a certain extent is unavoidable but can be effected by several things such as hull to prop clearance, shape of the hull, etc. Our boat has a Martec prop which is similar to the Max Prop and has only a little tendency to pull the stern to port in reverse. The Cal 31 we owned before had much more prop walk and it could actually come in handy. We could spin it around in just a little more than a boat length by alternately using forward and reverse with the rudder hard right. Of course, sometimes this worked against us...

The more pitch your prop has the worse the prop walk. First of all, the speed you get at 1700-1800 rpm sounds way too high. Can you get up to 3600 at full throttle? At 7 knots you should be more like 2500-2600. Lugging the engine is a bad thing.

Our Martec allows for different pitch adjustments in forward and reverse. Their recommendation, as I recall, was to pitch reverse about 2/3 of the forward setting. Once we made an emergency stop from about 3 knots with the original 3-blade fixed prop when a boat shot out of the marina fairway in front of us. By the time we were stopped we'd turned about 90°. I simulated the same conditions with the Martec to make sure we had enough pitch if faced with the same situation and we only turned about 30°. Based on this limited data I would expect you should have less prop walk than with the fixed prop if the pitch is right.