Boats do great in the water but usually don’t function so well on land, and trucks gobble up miles of interstate but are often single-use submersibles when used on large bodies of water. As such, the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship of sorts. You can put a truck on a ferry to move it across a lake, and you can strap a boat on a trailer and pull it behind a truck. Unfortunately, getting the boat on the trailer requires human input, and that’s where things can run amok. This clip is going viral on the “Idiots Towing Things” subreddit, and it’ll make you realize that there’s more than one wrong way to tow a boat out of the water at the boat launch.
In a way, it’s easy to understand why so many videos of towing mistakes are out there. It’s not a subject typically taught well in driver’s ed, and adding more wheels, more mass, a coupling, and an articulation point to whatever you’re driving is going to result in a vastly different experience than just driving a car. What makes this incident so incredible is that the fail starts before the load is even really on the trailer, and accelerates when the Ram 1500 tow vehicle hits the gas.
Normally, once you have your trailer in the water and the boat roughly in place on the trailer, you hook up the winch, crank that thing down, then add safety chains so it can’t go anywhere. Something tells me that possibly didn’t happen here, as evidenced by whatever train of thought led to a guy hooking his legs inside the bow and holding onto the tailgate of the truck in what appears to be an attempt to keep the boat in place.
Probably should have put the hook on it
byu/terribleazn inIdiotsTowingThings
On the face of things, this doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea. After all, winch lines and safety chains are rated for hundreds, even thousands of pounds. The average person probably isn’t rated to hold the same amount of weight. Indeed, 15 seconds into the video, premonitions become reality as our human safety chain slips free of the boat and receives a Knoxville and Co.-tier nutshot from the trailer winch.
In case that didn’t seem unfortunate enough, things get worse. Unsurprisingly, as the truck continues to drive forward, the boat keeps sliding backward on the trailer, achieving a full dismount right as the boat launch gets shallow. Buddy’s still hanging onto the tailgate of the Ram for dear life, and I can only imagine that whatever mass of tarpaulin is in the bed of that truck has a serious effect on rearward visibility.
Mercifully, the driver of the Ram stops after realizing that the boat is now resting on the ground, and that’s when the arguing starts. While the audio’s fairly quiet, a few exasperated hand gestures are enough to get the gist of what’s going on here. Maybe the strategy of “No, fuck it, just peel out” shouted right as everything starts to go wrong wasn’t the right call.
In a way, I get it. Loading a boat trailer can be a huge ass-pain, even with two people. Lining everything up, winching, locking things down, it’s not quite as easy as say, hitching up a small trailer you can pull around with your hands. However, taking shortcuts doesn’t always end well, and best practices exist for a reason. So, the next time you find yourself backing your tow rig down the boat launch, just be safe, yeah?
Top graphic image: Reddit
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I find it pretty easy to launch/retrieve my 24′ boat by myself, and usually beat most groups doing the same with their boat.