Re: 35 johnson pitch
In reading the exchanges and your getting worse comment with passenger movement, you are plowing: Boat has too much hull in the water, nose diving. You need to move your tilt pin out until you get the best improvement. Moving it out will raise the bow (front) of the boat and result in less engine loading (more rpms) and pushing it too far out will cause problems getting up on plane, or could ventilate (engine revs up but boat speed falls off).
On what the engine sounds like and Steel's guess, you are at two extremes here. One the engine is lugging (your comment) and otherwise it is overrevving and it would be screaming. But Steel said he assumed some things sooooo.
Not familiar with an '88 but the old 35's of the 50's era only ran up to 5000 max rating and they were very quiet and the sound was low pitched....that was one of their selling features.
Tell you what. Go out by yourself and tweak the tilt pin for best performance. Then add your passengers and have them move about for best performance. Tell us how it went.
Mark
