launching from a hoist

[AJ Oliver]

I'm sure you know this, but in case not . .

Be very sure to tie the two slings together, lest one of them start to slip off.

[alanhsails]

AJ Oliver....will do.

I will need my own straps, since the two-ton hoist at the marina has straps but the three-ton doesn't. According to my measurements, an 18 footer will give me a bit of clearance above the upper lifeline for the forward strap, and a 19 footer will do it for back by the line jammers on the cabintop. This is when having the strap attachment points at about 9 feet apart on the spreader bar.

I got them here: http://www.uscargocontrol.com/Lifting-S ... ing-Slings

It would cost about $115 for the two straps, in 3-inch wide single ply nylon if you bought them already stitched from US Cargo Control and if they're just looped, without steel D-ring ends. If you get them with big 3 ton D rings at the ends it costs 3x more. I don't understand why, but it does.

I'm planning on getting 3 inch wide, single ply nylon straps which are rated for about 9K pounds each, when in "basket" configuration. I just got the straps, unsewn. US Cargo Control also sells the 3-inch D Rings, which are about 6,000 working load. I bought four of them. I'm taking the lot to my favorite sailmaker, and will pay her probably $30-40 to stitch up the ends so that the whole thing is just stupid-strong. ---- 18/19 foot straps with big huge steel D rings on the ends.

Two inch wide straps would have been plenty strong enough but for the minimal price difference I figure it's good to have slightly wider straps on the hull. This weekend I discovered that Home Depot sells 15 foot and 20 foot lengths of this strapping in two-inch widths. The packaging claims that it's something like 7,000 working load. It's set up for a car/truck towing strap and it's about $15 for 20 feet. sheesh. I was tempted to just buy the 20 foot lengths and cut to measure, then take 'em to my friend with the industrial sewing machine, but I figured the load-spreading feature of the wider straps was probably worth it.

Anyway, if someone wants to make slings for the Club hoist, it can be done without totally destroying the Clubs bank account. If you're lifting small keelboats like Cal 20's, Ynglings, Capri 22's or Tanzer/ODay 22-23's, or big dinghies like Lightnings then the two-inch wide straps from Home Depot, stitched to some the three-inch D rings from US Cargo Control would easily do the job, I think. This is assuming you have a spreader bar that's up to the job.

I'd store the Home Depot straps/D rings out of the weather, though. They're probably polypropylene and sunlight will weaken them considerably over time.

[alanhsails]

Update on that last post.

They don't sell the nylon webbing in short lengths. They either make it up for you or they send you an entire spool. However, they sell polypropylene 3 inch webbing which is even stronger. I got 45 feet of it, which including shipping from Urbana IL to California, will cost me about $52. The four 6,000 lb working load D-rings including shipping were $36. I will set up the straps on the boat and cut to the exact length I want... Synthia the SailmakerLady will stitch them all up. I have some extra so she can set up her machine tension and so on. She'll probably charge me about $40, it will be about 45 minutes of work for her I would guess.

All up, I estimate the straps will cost about $120- $130 and should easily lift boats up to 6,000 lbs. and probably significantly more.

So if your Club hoist needs new straps, there ya go.

[alanhsails]

Here's the boat under the current Marina 3-ton hoist. it barely fit, I have about a foot more chain to pull. Next time I'll crank the board up.





you can see where the straps need to be to balance the boat. It took me three tries, wrestling the aft strap further back and then further back again until the boat came up off the trailer, balanced.

[alanhsails]

I'm being "removed" from this marina and moving to another one where I have to supply my own lifting apparatus. The straps in these pictures are mine. The one the marina has are too small. The secondary hanging bars in the pictures are about 5 feet long. My four-point lifting frame is 9 feet from side to side and 40 inches fore-and aft so the straps will be angled out a bit. It **should** just fit under the boom.

[SailingUphill]

OK I'll state the obvious again...
Is there no launch ramp, you could just float the boat off? These boats are easier to launch than a motorboat, kind of their best feature.

[alanhsails]

Boat weighs somewhere between 4,000 and 4,400 pounds. Trailer weighs, according to the DMV certificate, 800 pounds. So this is something on the order of 5,000 pounds.

I have a 1999 Chevy S-10, 4 cylinder, manual transmission truck. That truck has a tongue weight allowance of 350 pounds. It's rated to tow 2,000 pounds. How am I going to pull a 5,000 pound boat/trailer combination up a slippery ramp at low tide with my truck? Maybe I can do it. Maybe not. Am I willing to let my truck go for a swim in order to find out? Maybe I can do it once, just at high tide? Yeah. Maybe. The deal with Mrs. Alan was to buy a BOAT not a boat and a truck.

I'm not "wet-sailing" this boat. I want to dry-sail it to save on expenses. It's almost $1,000 a year less expensive in terms of berth rent ("dry-slip" rent) to keep the boat on a trailer and launch it when you need it, than it is to leave it in the water. Then there's the annual haulout. I can't remember ever having one that didn't cost me at least $700. So it's $1700 per year less expensive to dry-sail the boat than it is to leave it in the water, here in Northern California. The deal with Mrs. Alan was that I'd dry-sail the boat.

Gentlemen, I understand that the boat is trailerable. In fact I rented a big 8 cylinder pickup from U-Haul and towed the boat and trailer 2 1/2 hours from where it was dry-stored to its current location without issue. In fact, it was easy. If I had that truck instead of my little truck I would have no concerns about launching it.

[SailingUphill]

Yours is quite simplly an odd issue towards launching, but I DO understand. NO I would NOT do it with an S10 you'd smoke your clutch quite quickly. Also I totally get the dry sail versus wet cost issue.

[alanhsails]

Frustrated. SERIOUSLY frustrated.

The marina at which I was keeping the boat was purchased from the former owner in 2012, just before he died. His long-time tenant and friend, Svend Svendsen and Svends son, Sean were matched up with SF Bay Area real estate developer Bill Poland to make the deal happen. Poland put up 90% of the money and got 51% of the company. Svend has since died,and Poland has decided that it's time to move to make his tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars real estate killing. He unveiled a plan to completely bulldoze the marina, which has been a going concern since shortly after WW II, evict all the dry-stored boats and business tenants and put in about 400 townhouses and condos.

I didn't like this plan, and I wrote an op-ed in the local paper about it. A week later when I got back from Christmas vacation and went to the post office, there was a 30-day eviction notice from the dry storage.

This past weekend I moved the boat to another yard, the only other one on the Bay which has a 3-ton hoist and anywhere near enough clearance to actually launch a boat. Upshot is that the apparatus I got built to hoist the boat...not what you are seeing in the photos above, works just great. It picks the boat up just fine and weighs about 125 pounds....but it doesn't fit under the hook. The 13' 8" clearance off the ground is not enough. There's a safety guardrail at the edge of the launch area with a 6-foot wide "gate" in it. As we all know, the 7.9 is 9 feet wide. It doesn't fit through the gate. That means I have to go OVER a 4-foot tall fence /guardrail to get to my trailer, and there just isn't room.

FRUSTRATED.

And so, after all this ****, and a thousand dollars spend on that damn hoisting sling, I will be ramp-launching the damn boat, but using a 12 V. truck winch to do it.

[Tim Bosma]

Alan,
Welcome to the class! I just updated the owners list with some of your info.
Thanks,

[alanhsails]

I used a rented U-Haul 8 cylinder Ford F-250 to haul the boat out on the trailer at a ramp here in the Bay Area this weekend. Easy-Peasy. sheesh. I see why you guys like doing that, it was a piece of cake with a trailer tongue extension.

[alanhsails]

While ramp-launching the boat with the big 8 cylinder U-Haul pickup was a piece of cake, I don't own that truck. So what the hell, I gave it a shot with the Chevy S-10 at low tide. Nope. I got lots of smoke from the clutch and a bad smell.

So next I bought a 2-ton-pull, 12 volt truck winch from SuperWinch and tried that. Nope.

so in complete disgust I went back to U-Haul, rented the truck again and hauled the damn boat out on its trailer. It's now sitting in dry storage while I save up the $900 it's going to cost to do the bottom job.

Meanwhile the fight with the developer over the Alameda Marina and it's 3-ton hoist, where I was originally going to keep the boat in the first place, rages on. I'm sailing my 15 foot skerry, instead.

[alanhsails]

The haulout, bottom paint, and so on is scheduled for two weeks out. It will be nice to actually sail the bluidy boat rather than just pay money to store it.

I'll also move the outboard bracket and install the roller furling. Then it'll be time to have some fun....finally.

[alanhsails]

I've now pulled the boat out and launched her twice with a big pickup from U-Haul. It's totally painless....as you all know.

[alanhsails]

And the final iteration of over a years worth of BS is that the boats been hauled out, and two coats of black Petit Hydrocoat have been put on.



She's now been sailed down to her berth at the Marina I've always kept my boats at, and she'll be wet-sailed for the foreseeable future. The trailer is for sale for $650 on craigslist. I'm putting on roller furling, since I'm going to singlehand and doublehand the boat, almost exclusively. Once P-Yacht sends me a threaded turnbuckle I can send the luff length to Doyle and two new headsails will arrive. Her first race, which will be done with trashed, old white dacron sails, is January 28th.



Oh and she got all new standing rigging and a "new to me" 6 HP four-stroke outboard this past summer.