i have kept the tritoon in a slip for six years and this fall i finally bought a trailer for it so i can quit paying winter haul out and quit being stuck on one lake. boat is a 23 foot three tube on 27s, about 3,300 pounds with the 200 on it.
trailer is a used tandem scissor style, no brand sticker left on it. loaded the boat once at the public ramp and two things were wrong. it sits about an inch and a half higher on the port side, and when i got it home and crawled under, the center tube is resting on the front crossmember with a shiny wear mark already on the aluminum.
questions for the guys who trailer.
on a tritoon, do the bunks carry the outside tubes only, or is the center tube supposed to be on something?
how high above the fender should the bunk tops be so the boat drives on straight instead of hunting?
guide poles, how tall and how far back, and does anybody run bunk carpet or is everybody on the slick plastic now?
and the ramp itself. our ramp on the east side is shallow and long, and i was in water to my knees walking the bow line while my wife backed. there has to be a better way to do this than the way we did it.
stop trailering it until the center tube is off that crossmember. aluminum against steel with a couple thousand pounds bouncing on it will wear through a tube wall, and a tube with a hole in it is a boat that sits stern down at the dock in june.
on a scissor trailer the outside bunks carry the boat. the center tube either floats free or rides on its own bunk that the trailer maker built for it, and you can tell which by whether there is a mount for one. if there is no center bunk and the tube is touching a crossmember, your outside bunks are too low, or the trailer was set up for a two tube boat and somebody sold it to you as a tritoon trailer.
bunk height: the underside of the deck should clear the fenders by an inch or two with the boat sitting on the bunks. bunk length matters more than people think, you want the bunk carrying the straight middle section of the tube, not out on the nose cone. never let a bunk end sit right under the seam where the nose cone is welded on.
carpet or the slippery plastic caps, either one works, but wet carpet against bare aluminum for eight months of winter storage will corrode a tube in a way that will make you sick when you see it. if the boat lives on the trailer over winter, get the plastic. if it is only on the trailer to move, carpet is fine and it grips better on the ramp.
the port list is probably one bunk bracket bent or a shim missing. lay a level across the fence rails and shim the low bunk, they are usually 3 inch channel and slotted.
for the shallow ramp, two things fixed it for me and neither one costs much.
first, a tongue extension. mine is a slide out with two pins, cost 240 at a trailer shop in Baxter, and it gets the trailer eight feet further down the ramp without the truck's rear tires getting into the algae. if you do not want to buy one, a 20 foot strap between the ball and the trailer works, you just have to be able to stop the trailer with the winch strap and your hands, and it is a two person job.
second, quit walking the boat. put a bow line and a stern line on the boat, hand one to the person on the dock, and drive the boat onto the bunks under its own power with the motor trimmed up. on a shallow ramp people submerge the trailer too far and then the boat floats over the bunks and lands crooked. deeper is not better, the bunks should be about half out of the water when the boat comes on.
guide poles. mine are 60 inch uprights set about two thirds of the way back from the winch post, and that is the number i would tell anybody with a fence boat. tall enough that you can see them over the rail from the truck mirror, far enough back that the boat is already lined up before the bow hits the winch stand.
the thing about a pontoon on a ramp that nobody says out loud is that the fence is a sail. a 23 footer has forty some square feet of vertical aluminum on each side. in a crosswind the boat will walk sideways off the bunks between the time it touches and the time you crank it tight, and it does it slowly enough that you think you have time. the poles are what stops that, not your arms.
pad them. bare galvanized pole against the fence leaves black marks that do not buff out.
since you bought a used trailer, do the bearings before you do anything else. mine came apart on highway 210 east of Fergus Falls with the boat on it, on a trailer i had owned for three weeks and assumed was fine. the hub got hot enough to blue the spindle and i sat on the shoulder for four hours.
pull both hubs, look at the races, repack with marine grease, new seals, and put a spare hub kit in the tow vehicle. sixty dollars of parts. and if it has the spring loaded bearing protectors, do not pump them full until grease runs out the back, that is how you push the rear seal out and get water in.
check the wiring while you are under there too. every used trailer i have bought had at least one ground wire hanging by two strands.
report. the trailer was built for a two tube boat, exactly like bill guessed. no center bunk mount anywhere on it. the shop in Spirit Lake built and welded two brackets and moved the outside bunks up 2 inches and out 4, and the center tube now clears the crossmember by about three fingers. 480 dollars with the shim work and a new set of bunk boards, and the port side list turned out to be a bracket somebody had hammered on before i owned it.
bearings were dry on the driver side, so wanda saved me a trip on a shoulder somewhere. new kits both sides, new seals, and i left the protectors half full.
the strap trick got me through fall haul out but i ordered the slide out tongue for spring. and for anybody hauling one of these across state lines, the width and lighting rules are worth reading rather than guessing, ours are on the state DOT site at dot.state.mn.us for the Minnesota trips and Iowa has its own page. a 23 foot tritoon on 27 inch tubes is right at 102 inches wide and that is not the same as 8 foot 6.
Log in to reply. Accounts are given out by hand, ask a mod.
