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[dkuster]

...The trailer has rollers (not bunks) and I'll be towing with a car. Any suggestions?

Just be sure to stay clipped in backing down to launch...buddy of mine set his (BIG) boat smack down on the ramp the first time he went to launch with rollers.

yeah I for sure don't have to power load. My boat slides right up no problem. Problem is it slides back down when the weight shifts forward.

You must be backed in too deep.

Thanks, but I was really asking about how to load with rollers, not unload. (Especially with no helpers).

Unloading is _too_ easy with rollers :lol:

 

[RivRunR]

Unloading is _too_ easy with rollers :lol:

That's what my buddy found out...the hard way! (on a Brand-New-Never-Seen-Water Boat!!!)

 

[PSG-1]

Unloading is _too_ easy with rollers :lol:

That's what my buddy found out...the hard way! (on a Brand-New-Never-Seen-Water Boat!!!)

Ouch! That sucks. And this is a prime example of why I do NOT like rollers, I prefer bunks. While rollers may allow the boat to glide onto and off the trailer easily, sometimes, that can be a serious issue, as the situation you described clearly illustrates.

With that said, I always back my trailer in until the tops of the fenders are visible, and at that point, only the front 2 or 3 feet of the bunks are exposed above the water. This small amount helps to keep the boat from sliding back off when I go to the front of the boat to clip off the bow eye.

One problem I have at one of the ramps I use, is that the angle of the ramp is not consistent throughout the tide range. The high tide part of the ramp is steeper, while the low tide part of the ramp is flatter.

At high tide, my boat goes right on the trailer, and the bow eye lands right underneath the roller, where it should be.

But at low tide, the bow ends up being a foot lower that the winch/roller on the trailer, so, I have to get out of the boat, get in the truck, and pull up the ramp a few feet, until I see the bow lift up on my boat, then I crank it the rest of the way onto the trailer.

A few years ago, I made a prototype of a device I was going to call a 'speed clip' Basically, it was designed to bolt to the trailer where the winch roller would be, and when you ran the boat onto the trailer, the bow eye locked into a groove. (Picture a gigantic clothes pin made out of steel, that's what it looks like)

The mechanism was spring-loaded, and to release it, you flipped a lever, which was linked to a cam that opened the 'jaws' of the speed clip. But, under actual testing, I found that not all ramps have the same angle, and some of them, like the one I described, have an angle that changes as you go down the slope of the ramp. With the speed clip being a precise kind of thing, it just wouldn't work for my applications. it might work for someone on a lake, that always used the same ramp, but for someone who uses multiple ramps, no way it would ever work.