I was taught that if you hold the
car’s steering wheel on the bottom, instead of the top, when you’re backing
down the ramp you simply turn the wheel the way you want the trailer (and boat)
to go. But I was never taught how much
you need to turn the wheel. That comes with practice, I suppose, but I’ve never
been able to practice because on the few occasions when I’ve been asked to back
a friend’s boat down the ramp, the trailer has somehow ended up sideways across
my intended path of progress.
I know of people who have added a
tow-hitch to the front of their cars. After they’ve towed the trailer to the
head of the ramp in the usual way, they unhitch and then fasten the trailer to
the front hitch. They can then see exactly what is happening as they guide the
trailer down the ramp, and the way to turn the steering wheel becomes quite
obvious and natural. You can do it with your hands on top, for a start.
But you have to be careful about how
far you drive the front end of the car into the water. The engine doesn’t like
being submerged. This can make for difficulties in getting the boat to budge
off the trailer if you can’t get it into water deep enough to float it.
The Canadian comic odd-job man,
Red-Green, has the answer to these problems, though, and that is to make one
rigid component of the car-trailer combination. That does away with the
troublesome universal joint at the hitch.
Here he is on YouTube, in a piece
called "Red-Green’s boat-car," showing you how to do it for yourself.
Today’s
Thought
Beware
of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Foreign Bodies
Tailpiece
“And how do you find the food at boarding school,
son?”“Oh, we fight over it all the time, Dad.”
“Wow. That good, is it?”
“Not exactly, Dad. The loser has to eat it.”
(Drop by every Monday,
Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)
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