Dear Joan,

In response to David Knight’s letter in the last Bulletin, about hauling heavy dinghies in and out of the water, the trick is to have a properly set up trailer with a winch and a jockey wheel, and to always use the car to move the trailer up and down the slipway.

It has always puzzled me how the owners of sailing dinghies struggle to float their dinghies on to the trailer. They get their feet wet, do their backs in and fray their tempers, while the owners of heavy sports motor boats whip their huge craft in and out of the water with ease, because they always invest in decent trailers. I know we all hate motorboats, but that does not mean that we can’t learn from the way they are launched and recovered.

My trailer, which is a Snipe, is set up with plenty of keel rollers, as well as side wheels to stop the keel jumping off. To launch I leave the trailer attached to the car with the road wheels just short of the water. With a sharp heave the boat just shoots off the rollers into the water, like a life boat. Getting the boat back on again is usually just like that in reverse, depending on how steep the slipway is — steeper is best because it puts the trailer at the right angle. Otherwise I use a short length of rope between the ball hitch on the car and the nose of the trailer, which allows the trailer to tilt as the boat is winched up the rollers. With this method I can even lift the boat up off dry ground — the boat does not need to be afloat at all. Indeed sometimes the best strategy on a slip way with a fast falling tide is just to let the boat dry out, and recover it dry.

I would go into greater depth, except that our esteemed Technical Advisor wrote an exhaustive article for this very Bulletin on this subject a few years back, which was in fact the basis of the modifications to my own trailer, and David would be best to refer back to it. My basic point is however that there is no problem at all with launching and recovering a heavy boat as long as you always, always, always let the car or the winch do the work. RB