On Dock Moorage

[itsermam]

Our sailing club offers "on dock moorage" - you build your own storage cradles on an assigned patch of dock and store your boat on it when not in use. You can even install a winch, rollers, etc... to aid in the launching and retrieval process. I am thinking about switching to this - seems a lot easier than launching from the trailer every time we want to go out - and I am wondering if anyone out there has any experience with this kind of arrangement. My main concern is weight - the biggest boats on the dock right now are Thistles and Lidos - and whether hauling our DS I out, even with a winch, is going to be an epic battle. Any thoughts or experience on this kind of set up? Anyone happen to have plans for a set of cradles or a winch stand?

Thanks!

[Roger]

years ago I had a small boat, about half the weight of a ds I but used a similar concept to pull the boat onshore. I used a couple of planks laid flat parallel to each other and tied together like a ladder with cross members underneath. The distance between the two planks was just slightly wider than a boat roller and there were about a half dozen rollers. The cross members were perhaps a few feet apart so it looked like a flat ladder. Weight was about 30 pounds. It was pretty easy to lay one end of the runway in the water, and pull the bow onto the first roller. From here I could easily pull the boat along the rest of the way up the beach. I would tie it to a tree and that was the end of it until the next time I needed to launch. I also used this system to pull it up onto my utility trailer when I wanted to move the boat home. In this case I had a trailer winch mounted on a short winch mast on the trailer.

There is no reason that for your purposes you could not built the cross members a bit wider and have a set of guides in place to support the gunwals so that the boat does not flop over.

[Moose]

I think I have almost exactly what you want(maybe even a little too beefy). I'll try to take some pictures while I'm working on my boat today and post them tonight or tomorrow.