Moving Day

Today is the long awaited day for finally moving Tarka to her new trailer. Decided to use Swanley Bridge Marina slipway again for convenience.

Since reconfiguring the rollers on the new trailer earlier in the year I’ve been waiting patiently for the time when I find out if all that effort has been worthwhile. Basically I had no idea if the keel rollers would be aligned correctly. At best it was an estimate using the known curvature of the keel, but not knowing the exact position of the centre of gravity of the boat or how this would line up with the rollers in conjunction with the bow snubber and winch setup. I also had only a best guess whether the vee guide I had made would work. Would it guide the boat in or would the boat get jammed?

The first attempt loading the boat proved that the vee guide was just about perfection guiding the bow up to align with the first set of keel rollers and holding the hull in the correct alignment while floating onto the trailer. No adjustment necessary there, but bringing the boat up to the bow snubber there was about 3/4in gap between the keel and the nearest set of rollers. It looked like the winch had lifted the bow up a little. For this I was able to lower the winch on its post about the same amount so hopefully that would fix that issue.

It took two or three attempts to get the side rollers set at the right height but then found we had negative weight on the jockey wheel. Ideally we needed 90-100kg nose weight so I reckoned we needed to bring the boat about 1ft 3in forward going on the overall boat weight of 1500kgs across a length of 18ft. After moving the winch post up and reloaded the boat we definitely had a good weight on the jockey wheel and additionally the adjustment seemed to rectify the gap under the first set of keel rollers.

It was a long day but managed to get everything safely home the same day so that was good. The real bonus though was the overall matching of of the boats shape onto the new keel roller setup which was perfect. All rollers making good contract with the keel was my main concern and that seemed to have worked out. The move took longer than expected logistically, after three round trips to fetch both trailers one round trip wasted due to forgetting the spare vehicle reg. plate.