Trev’s Tips

The littler Bulldog

 It’s been a number of years now since I owned a dinghy that I could take camping with me to those far off destinations, but when I did have one I always remember the difficulty of getting the dinghy to the waters edge from the campsite or retrieving the boat back onto the beach at night time.  It always surprised me how hard it was to drag what appeared a fairly lightweight boat with only a small motor (15 hp) up the beach to keep it safe at night time.  I guess once it has a fuel tank on board, anchor, safety gear, a bit of fishing tackle and perhaps some water in the bottom that had slopped in over the side from the days trip plus also the fact that you are generally dragging the boat up a slight incline on the beach and suddenly it is no longer a one man job to move the boat.

We always managed somehow but looking back on it this may well have been part of the reason for having a weak back now.  Apart from the fact that it was hard work dragging the boat I’m quite sure it did not do the boat any good either.  My dinghy was quite old already when I bought it and it gave me many years of good service, but in its last few years a number of holes appeared in the back end of it where the aluminium had just worn so thin that the slightest knock caused a hole.  It doesn’t make for a good trip when you trailer a boat 500+ kms to your favourite fishing spot to discover that the hull is leaking.  I’m sure that dragging the boat up and down the coarse sand of a beach contributed largely to the aluminium at the back of the boat becoming so thin.

Now days many people overcome this problem by carrying a small collapsible trailer (the bulldog is a very common one) which is used for the purposes of such moves.  They are an excellent idea but do have the disadvantage of still being quite large to transport, can take up a lot of  storage space at home and  are quite expensive to buy initially.

The reason I decided to write this article was so that those that don’t think something like a bulldog best suits their needs then perhaps this idea may been an alternative.  To describe it simply it is just a set of wheels that can be strapped onto the back of a boat along with a home made draw bar that can be attached to the car.

I will not put design measurements in here because I think there should be enough photos for you to get an idea of how it is made.  The construction is very simple and can be modified to suit any type of aluminium dinghy. 

The wheels used in this are 8 inch Holden HT rims with inflatable aircraft tyres.  They are probably a bit of an overkill for the job they are doing but it just happens that they were lying around not being used so why not utilise them.  In reality something like a nice wide wheel barrow wheel would be just as good and would be a lot lighter.

The wheels themselves are held in place by a ratchet strap that goes around the boat and the hull rests on a small section of angle iron at the inside end of the axle (just visible in the photos below).  The design was kept simple and as such no bearings or hubs were involved, just a couple of bits of pipe steel that fit neatly into each other for the axle to turn on. 

The draw bar section has a rope at the top (see photo below) which ties onto the grab handle at the front of the boat to stop it shifting.

The whole setup only takes a couple of minutes to attach to the boat and is stable enough to allow easy transportation over a beach or bush track.

The draw bar can also be used to lift the front of the boat by hand and manually drag it if so desired.

Of course you’ll never be able to licence this like a bull dog trailer and it will take a few hours of creativity to make the whole setup but at the end of you’ll have a very simple system for transporting your boat over short distances and it can be made out of scraps laying around the house or local salvage yard at a fraction of the cost of a commercially made product. 

Anyway, I just this may be of interest to some people that do not have a method of transporting their dinghies once they come off the camper trailer or the roof rack of the car.

Till next time

Happy 4wding 

Trevor

When a bloke with experience meets a bloke with money, the bloke with money gets the experience; the bloke with experience gets the money!