October 30, 2009
Never before attempted…
… by us. The ongoing saga. The day flew by. We hauled Bob the ski boat out of the water and parked him in the side yard, and then went to work on Weave, our Wittholz designed, Cape Cod Shipbuilding built catboat (one of two built in 1976.) Yesterday, we pulled the mast. Today, we wanted to put it on its trailer, something, like the mast pulling, we’d never done before.
Captain Sweet Cheeks heading out through Turtle Alley. Ya gotta love them turtles that get out there so late in the season. There are about eight of ‘em in that picture.
And before ya know it…
We had no idea how the boat would sit on the trailer, or even if it would. We bought boat and trailer as a set, but hadn’t yet ourselves put them together. Over the summer, I cleaned up the trailer, replaced the keel board and pads, and gave it a new winch, but none of that informed as to how the trailering act would work. Neither of us had ever trailered a sailboat.
The trailer has an extendable tongue so that the trailer can be backed farther into the water than would be necessary for a boat with no keel, and the extending and retracting of the tongue requires extra effort and diligence in the midst of the trailering process. But it all went off without a hitch (so to speak). Admiral Sweet Cheeks, fighting a cross wind, drove the boat precisely up the middle and landed on the pads nicely. The winch cranked ‘er in almost effortlessly. I had to enter the icy depths to crank the aft pads up against the boat’s bottom, but while the water was cold, the air was warm, and the driver’s seat in the truck has been drenched before.
The picture above was taken just after we hosed and brushed the undersides free of most of the gunk there. It cleaned up surprisingly well, and there’s more of the anti-fouling paint left than I had any reason to believe would be. I spent a long time eyeballing the bottom, as I’d never seen it before. Of particular interest is the sort of "wing" that the previous owner added to the bottom of the keel, any ostensible reason for it escaping me at present. I’m not sure I like it. And it sure is different than I imagined it to be from groping it underwater.
By the way, that’s the fixed keel version of the Cape Cod Shipbuilding catboat, pictures of the bottom of which the Internets have been loathe to cough up. Nor have I been able to find pictures of any boat on that particular trailer rig. If anyone is in a similar situation and needs pix, let me know. I’ve got a lot of ‘em, now.
