Easy does it,
We are NOT looking for a bigger boat after nine years with our TC255. We hope to keep cruising on it as long as we’re able to.
Based on our cruising experiences, we believe MOST lady boaters REALLY want that ‘separate head and shower’ etc option. Colby and Rosanne may be delightful exceptions (and are a truly delightful couple).
I wrote and Eileen edited a recent submission to the AGLCA Link newsletter (published in the Dec-Jan edition) for potential loopers in the Planning stage who have not yet purchased their boat. Segment Looping is no different than any other cruising adventure on boats. I hope it may be helpful here in addressing some common issues, while being realistic about why the trailer boating world is the way it is as we see it.
Although very long-winded (like me) this might be the place to share it, since only Members can access the AGLCA Forum.
A Loop Planners Introduction to the trailerable cruiser option for Looping...in Segments or The Whole Thing
We’ve been running trailer boats since we met over 40 years ago. We’re on our 13th trailer boat, a C-Dory Tom Cat 255 which we’ve had for a record 9 years. It’s been great for our 3,000 miles (and 200 locks) on the Loop so far and for many other cruising adventures as well. I’m hoping to share some of what we’ve learned with Planning couples who haven’t yet purchased their Loop boat. We’ve met some who never even considered the possibility that a cruising trailer boat might fit their needs.
A few boat builders cater to buyers who want a trailerable cruising boat with berths for sleeping, a galley to prepare on-board meals, a head (toilet), and shower. Looping on such a trailer boat may well be the least expensive way for a couple to explore the Loop, especially if the crew eats (and drinks) and parties the same way they do at home.
Although these boats are small, many cruising couples have found them to be big enough, especially if you’re only on the boat for cruising, meals, sleeping and in the cockpit for morning coffee and evening docktails. The rest of every day we’re off exploring, just like most Loopers. We’ve never spent a day on any of our boats waiting for the rain to stop. If you must accommodate overnight guests or a dog or both you may need a bigger boat.
You won’t need motels when you’re comfortable sleeping on your own boat. You won’t need restaurants when you can prepare the exact same meals on the boat that you do at home. Overall monthly expenses may be the same while cruising as they are at home. Home utilities and home fuel budgets may be diverted to your truck and boat fuel budgets.
While trailering to your boat ramp, you can stay on your boat overnight at many state parks (reserveamerica.com) for $18/night and use an RV 20A to 30A shore power adapter and a plumbing adapter to feed any gray water into a 5g bucket. (That’s called ‘Boater-homing’). Many WalMarts allow overnight parking and many Cracker Barrels allow staying in their RV slots with permission if you buy dinner. If you prefer 5-star hotels, that’s cool too.
Public boat ramps are often free or a nominal fee like $5-$10. Short term truck and trailer storage may be free at state, county and some city marinas. Neighbor.com has listings for short term rig storage rates that may be less than national storage chains.
Scooting your boat onto your own trailer is cheap compared to hauling out a large boat with a Travel-lift and storage ‘on the hard’ at a marina. Waterfront land is of course very expensive and limited.
If you ding an aluminum prop on a 150HP outboard, it can be fixed for about $60. Or you can have iboats.com send you a brand new one for about $100. Repairing many things on a traditional 35-45 foot Looper boat can run over a Boat Unit ($1,000). You may not need a washing machine or a water heater.
Anchoring in rivers on the segments can create a lot of anxiety for inexperienced and sometimes even for very experienced boaters. Especially if there are nearby waterfalls, dams, barges, towboats, snags, tipsy bass fisherman, or all of the above and all night long.
A trailerboat can typically use the type of mom and pop marinas that cater to outboard boats under 30 feet with at least knee-deep water at the dock, clean restrooms and showers and 30A (not 50A) shore power. Such marinas average about $1.00 to $1.25 a foot with no minimum footage per night (more in South Florida and tourist towns, but everything costs more in those places).
With shore power, air conditioning, heat, and galley appliances in a comfortable boat with a comfortable berth, you may have everything you want or need, including unlimited hot showers at your cheap marina. You won’t have the worries regarding anchoring out, or running (and servicing) a generator, many of which are ‘needy’ machines that can generate deadly carbon monoxide. You don’t need to worry about a dinghy, or dinghy davit installations, or spilling gas into Lake Champlain while trying to fill the dinghy outboard. If the boat sinks at the dock, you can wade to safety without getting your panties wet.
Often a grocery store and laundromat is within walking distance. You can use Skipper Bob and Waterway Guide for what’s available at the next marina and the online version for recent marina reviews. Be very aware that if that grid does not include the S for Showers, then that marina WILL NOT have showers.
When we anchor out, we use one pound propane bottles for cooking and percolator coffee on a $25 Coleman stove and a Lil’ Buddy propane heater while awake in the morning as a chill chaser.
You and yours can easily trailer 500 leisurely miles a day at 60-65 MPH while getting over 11 MPG in a ¾ ton diesel truck towing a 12,000# pocket yacht on your trailer. Pensacola to the Erie Canal is a quick three day trip (including launching) when you’re making an easy 500 miles a day. That is by far the cheapest way to get your boat from Point A to Point B, no contest.
It’s a huge advantage if you can hook up your trailer boat and take it anywhere on the continent, 24/7/365, without a special permit, and then launch it into any body of water that has a suitable boat ramp. This gives owners the ability to do one-way Loop segments, by arranging to get back to your launch point by bus, Amtrak, Enterprise, plane, or pre-arranged buddy for ‘rig shuttling’ from your launch ramp area back to your take out point. The segment can be as long or short as you like, as long as you can arrange rig storage and transportation.
However, you may be fine with simply backtracking on Loop segments rather than deal with the more complex logistics of a one-way loop segment. Your Loop, your call, as always.
Most cruising trailer boats can run much faster in open water compared to most traditional Looper boats ((up to 51 MPH for a TC255 with optional outboards). This can mean you get to the marina or town wall at noon rather than 5PM and grab a spot way before they are all full of slow boats and sailboats that can only make 8 MPH with a tailwind and favorable currents.
The Loop contains many segments of the best cruising grounds on the continent. However, with a trailer boat you’re not limited to exploring just the Loop. You can choose to trailer out to the Pacific coast and cruise the San Juan Islands and the Inside Passage of British Columbia, the Inside Passage of SE Alaska, or the Sea of Cortez, the canyons of Lake Powell, Lake Yellowstone at 7,000 feet, the Columbia and Snake rivers, etc etc.
You can freighter your boat and truck to France and explore the historic French canals with the money you save!
You can simply skip the segments that you find scary or tedious or boring (like the Gulf crossing). If you MUST have a gold ‘completed’ burgee, come back in May for that and a side trip to the Bahamas when there’s no Northern arctic fronts to worry about...the water may be calm as a mill pond. Floridians often ride jet skis to Bimini then.
If you want to avoid the hassles of obtaining multiple state permits to trailer your boat, your rig must fit within the Federal standards of being no more than 8.5 feet in beam, no higher than 13.5 feet on the trailer, and no longer than the standard semi-truck trailer...53 feet.
For a cruiser boat designer, the 8.5 feet beam is the hardest part, then the 13.5 feet height on the trailer. (A boat with a 8.5 ft beam and 53 feet long would not do well on the water, even with thrusters).
If your rig is over 8.5 ft beam, you must obtain an ‘oversize permit’ from each and every state you will trailer through. In Florida, it may take up to three days after you pay for a permit to receive it, and even then it’s only valid for ten days, and there are two counties in FL with additional time and day restrictions on travel. (Although we live in FL, we have no idea where those counties are). You must follow the route specified by each state DOT permit. From Pensacola, FL to launching in the Erie canal, one may travel through parts of eight states, each with different, and sometimes contradictory oversize permit requirements. If you think your own DMV can be sullen or unresponsive to your urgent needs, just think how much worse it could be in another state DOT when you’re not even a state resident.
Bottom line, if you choose to travel with an oversize rig, you lose most if not all of that total freedom to travel wherever and whenever you want on the continent without restrictions.
As always, you can pay other people to obtain permits from seven states for you, but it will cost a lot more than paying people to bring you groceries and you will still have myriad restrictions involving multiple counties you’ve never heard of in each of seven states and again on your return.
Now that you are thinking about (we hope) getting a non-oversize trailerable cruising boat and trailer, who builds them?
The vast majority cater to family fisherpersons and family boats, as one might suspect. A smaller number cater to us cruisers despite our tough demands. We want comfortable berths that aren’t in a ‘cave’, a galley with appliances and sink with hot and cold water, same for a shower (or a handheld in the head), a proper head that’s not a porti-potty and not by the bed (as on many fishing boats), air conditioning, heating, lighting, plenty of storage space, and 110v shore power in addition to the all the 12v and engine systems on all the fishing boats.
As just one example of the difficulty in integrating all these systems, consider the marine air conditioner and water cooled generator. The intakes for both must be below the waterline at all conditions of heel, in the boat the suction pump must be below the static water line, but the condenser unit above it, water outlet just above to avoid splash noise, the generator water muffler above it, and outlet just barely above it, etc etc etc. On our 12th trailer boat, in order to remove the generator, one would first have to remove the main propulsion engine.
Topside, cruising trailer boaters often want a proper dinghy up on the roof and a radar mount tall enough to straddle it, a couple of stand-up paddleboards, a GPS antenna, and a loudhailer/foghorn that are all not in the radar beam, a VHF and AIS antenna that are over 48” from the radar beam (impossible but usually works, though radar WILL fry any GPS sensor), and the anchor light has to be far enough above all that to be seen under any sea state at anchor.
Many such boats will weigh 10,000 to 16,000# in Heavy Cruise Mode and require a robust 2,000-4,000# trailer with huge tires that will tickle that road 13.5 height restriction a lot sooner than you might think. You don’t want to scrape off your radar dome on a bridge over I-80.
By lowering the VHF and AIS antennas, many trailer Looper boats can squeeze under bridges without waiting for an opening. Best of all, if you can get your air draft under 8 ft you can take the historic Lachine canal right through Montreal for free, without the expenses and long wait time for a slot on the commercial ship St Lawrence Seaway locks. Even if you have to remove the radar dome, it’s well worth doing. The Lachine canal may be the best gem on the Loop.
It is extremely difficult for a marine engineer to cram everything that we cruisers demand into this size envelope without making many compromises that are not required on a 40 foot or larger boat.
Fluid Motion (parent company of Ranger Tugs and Cutwater Boats) seems to be the sales leader in trailerable pocket yachts (although most of their models are over our 8.5 foot beam limit). Their boats sport impressive and elegant fit and finish (cherry wood, glass vase head basin etc). New models are running boat air conditioning on lithium batteries and inverters while underway, although there is not a long term track record on how well this will work out. RT/Cutwater began offering outboard powered boats in the past few years.
https://www.cutwaterboats.com/models/
https://www.rangertugs.com/models/
We have found that with an opening center front window (CRITICAL), we don’t need air conditioning even in south Florida in the summer at displacement speeds and above. It helps to have high quality DC fans pointed at our heads and an icy RTIC tumbler at hand.
Only a few hundred C-Dory Tom Cat 255’s have been built since the 2006 debut. C-Dory also builds 25 and 26 foot monohull models. They tend to be much more utilitarian and spartan than Fluid Motion boats, but have easier user access to the plumbing, 120v, 12v and other systems for owners who like to upgrade or tinker with or maintain their own boat.
https://www.c-dory.com/boats/
Rosborough was a Canadian company famed for building very heavy duty Nova Scotia police and commercial boats; but only one model without the ‘head by the bed’. It was bought out by Eastern Boats, which has its own series now.
https://www.easternboats.com/current-inventory
There are other ‘trailerable pocket yacht’ boats that may meet your needs as of 3rd qrtr 2021, and you and your crew should thoroughly research and vet them according to your needs!
We’ve met many Loopers who plan to meet up with friends or family at a particular city a month from now. That’s not advisable. It’s a boat, so stuff happens. It’s a waterway, so stuff happens. This summer the Erie Canal system was closed for twelve days due to flooding from heavy rains. Dockmasters told us the system was closed for 21 consecutive days due to flooding in 2017. The size, cost and complexity of your vessel expands exponentially when you start adding staterooms that you don’t actually use yet you must haul around the waterways.
A ‘schedule’ is the most dangerous thing on a Loop boat, but it’s OK to have daily ‘goals’. We found that making every third day a ‘weather/option’ day works best for us on our trailer boats. The ‘option’ can be to stay an additional night at a town wall that is much more fun than you thought it might be, or ‘weather’ days on the bodies of water that can get Small Craft Advisories (and there are a fair amount of those).
Here’s an account of a C-Dory 25 couple and their Loop with a dog “that would rather explode than do his business on the boat.” So they needed a dinghy.
https://daydreamsloop.blogspot.com/
Here’s an account of two Aussie guys Loop adventure on a borrowed C-Dory 26:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M1Y8T15/re ... TF8&btkr=1
Here’s an account of a solo female captain doing the Loop on a Ranger Tug 25:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M63E3F3/re ... TF8&btkr=1
Tugnuts.com site includes boats for sale and cruises and gatherings (under Forum Index).
C-Brats.com site includes boats for sale and Grand Adventures (under Forum Index).
We hope this helps in your search for your perfect cruising couple trailer boat!
Happy Hunting!
John and Editor in Chief Eileen
