| Vol 2 - Issue 6 | March 1998 |
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A Boat Too Far Road Tripped (Again) By Chris Bolton Some people learn nothing. Some people only learn by experience, and experience usually teaches us what we didn’t want to learn in the first place. After last year’s arduous trip to Sailfest with double stacked 20’s, you would have thought that we learned our lesson. Nope. Mr. Bolton started thinking again (and we all know what a dangerous process that is). “Hmmn, adapt to your environment, change your environment, or die” he thought. “How can we do this differently, and change some of the variables?”. Well, some back-of-the-envelope CAD work later, there was now a drawing of five (yes, five) boats on a 30 foot trailer, all intact and ready to go. Picture 1 Looks good on paper! This idea germinated for a while, until about a month later when Mr. Bolton observed a 30’ gooseneck hay trailer. “Hey-I know somebody that might have one of those!”. The farmer friend did indeed have one, and for the price of an inspection, the deal was done. Now all that remained was to sell the idea to the other fleet members. Simple plan: we’ll load 5 boats on this trailer, 3 of us will drive it down, and the rest can fly! Sure, what could go wrong? An extended-cab diesel pickup is borrowed from someone’s sister. This truck will tow a mountain across a river, no problem. Well, there is a small problem with the heater fan, and the radio, and the lights, and some other minor things...On to the trailer! All we needed was some simple 2x4 racks, and we’re good to go...funny, I didn’t notice before that the trailer was warped...oh, well, adjust the racks, load my boat, thank my family for their hours of labor and I’m off! |
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All of this work was being done about 100 miles away from the rest
of the fleet, so I take off for DC to load the boats. The 5th person, whose boat was
to be the top of the pyramid, suddenly chickened out and decided to drive down
himself. The rest of the boats were loaded and tied down over several nights, amid
much discussions of geometry, impact loads, and Chinese fire drills. The FINAL
tiedown occurred in the dark, in the rain, and consumed every piece of loose line in
the DC area. Final handshakes, cram the gear in the cab, and we’re off! The truck
is running great, accelerating slowly but having no problem with 65 mph. Yahoo!
Florida, here we come!
Roughly 100 miles south of DC, the truck starts to slow down, and just barely makes it under an overpass. |
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| A cloud of smoke rolls out from under the front of the truck as it stops. Not a good sign. A check of the transmission fluid reveals a dry stick, and a look under the truck reveals where all the fluid went. We all are stunned for a moment, unable to comprehend that we are dead in the water, about 700 miles short. We end up sitting there for about 6 hours, as we wait for police and disappearing tow trucks and watch the sun come up. We finally get towed off the interstate, and what a trip that is! A SMALL wrecker, with 4 of us in the cab, towing a BIG pickup and a 30’ trailer with 6’ of boat hanging off the end, and the driver tells us “They put tha wrong shocks on this ‘ere wrecka las’ time, and now the durn front wheels come off the ground every time we hit a bump!” That didn’t keep him from running over 60, though... So here we are, back where the trailer started from, only now it’s sitting in an impound lot, with the truck at a transmission shop. The only good news is that this is where we started from, my parents live nearby, and my car is at their house. We’re immediately on the phones, trying to catch our fellow fleet members before they leave for the airport. Too late! We call all over the state trying to locate another vehicle capable of towing a gooseneck trailer. We slowly begin to realize that we’ve become too specialized, and just like the dinosaurs, we’ve become extinct. We’ve gone down an evolutionary path that turned into a dead end... The transmission shop tells us that they can’t even look at our truck for a week. We find several firms that haul horses around the country for a living, but our momentary elation is quickly deflated when we hear quotes of $700-$1000 to get the trailer down to Florida. We eye several used pickups sitting on small lots, with the idea of “buying” the truck for the weekend. Common sense prevails and the reliability of small lot well-used trucks remains untested. We finally page our fellow fleet members at the airport in Orlando, and they pick up the phone with dread. One of them later admits to visions of a Hobie trailer running into a gas tanker, and the flaming wreckage careening into a nearby preschool. Our news isn’t THAT bad, but bad enough. Everyone agrees that $1000 is too much; maybe they can find boats down at Sailfest. With 500 plus boats being sailed, finding “empties” turns out to be impossible. One gallant member of the party, fluent in “Dude-speak”, is enlisted to attend several skateboard/Laser parties in the hopes of getting spare boats. He managed to survive the night, but showed up bleary-eyed the next morning boatless just the same. The one |
| member who trailered his own boat down the old fashioned way arrives to find himself the sole representative of Fleet 196. The rest of the group decides to have a good time anyway, and goes to visit Universal Studios. It rains big time. The next day they go to Disney World, and their luck continues as a tropical deluge soaks everyone, shuts down the rides, and closes the park! At this point, a normal person would have started getting nervous about the plane ride back home... |
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Meanwhile, the stranded transport crew makes arrangements to get the trailer towed back to the farmer who owns it, and also arranges to have the truck (eventually) fixed. A subdued crew finally drives back to DC, amusing themselves by counting gooseneck-capable pickup trucks on the highway. There are evidently quite a few of these in private hands (especially in the horse country of Virginia)- water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink... The next week, everyone grabs their trailer and drives 100 miles |
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(one way) to go get their boats. The farmer has
towed the trailer to a county landfill (for better 24 hour security); this is somehow
appropriate to the mood of the trip. We figure out the easy way to unload; the
trailer/rack idea actually works great, but no one is much pleased by this discovery.
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So there we are, much poorer (truck repairs before AND after the trip, rack
material costs, towing costs, gas costs, not to mention airplane and hotel costs in
Florida) and wiser.. I still think the base idea was sound, but you are putting all your
eggs in one basket. I noted with sympathy after our adventure that Rick White’s RV
died in the Everglades and another east-coaster’s van died mid-continent when
returning from a west-coast Nationals. Your rig is only as good as your tow vehicle!
I will note that most hay trailers are not used on the highway very often; be sure to
check tires, lights, and wheel bearings (you might also need BRAKES on the trailer,
as 4-5 Hobies and gear on a 30’ trailer starts to add up). We also found that DRY
storage space was very tight on a crew-cab pickup and a flatbed trailer. One good
idea that came out of this trip was to prepare a list of friends and relatives on the
projected route of any future long-distance trips, so that a shower and a shoulder to
cry on would never be too far away. Probably fortunately for us, Sailfest 96 may
have been the last big show, as this event was canceled for ‘97. However, there is
still Midwinter’s East, and Mr. Bolton has a great idea about using a U-Haul truck
with three 16s inside, towing double-stacked 20s. His new theory is that if the truck
breaks, just call up U-Haul and get another one! Stay tuned...
Chris Bolton cbolton@belvoir.army.mil Back to Features |