Tiger by the Tail

by Lenny Rudow

Cat advantage 13: Cats are easier to trailer

One of the most stressful things about boating is trailering your boat. Fact: You're in more danger when trailering your boat then you are when running it on the water. Fact: Some folks believe trailering a powercat is tougher then trailering a monohull. Fact: They haven't ever owned a cat and trailered it regularly, or they'd know that this belief is pure fiction.

How can I state this without using the usual caveats, like "sometimes" or "often"? Because in my boating career I've owned five different monohull and five different cat trailerboats, and have had seasonal use of another six monohull and four cat trailerboats. That's not to mention participating in a dozen or so boat-test rallies where we launched literally dozens of boats in a day. And through time I've noticed that cats are generally easier, not harder, to load onto a trailer. Now, here comes one of those caveats: this is only true when the trailer is properly designed and rigged to carry the specific cat that's on it. I've encountered flat-bunk trailers and improperly-rigged cat trailers that were a nightmare, usually because someone played the mix-and-match game when they bought a used boat from one source and a trailer from a different one. Unfortunately, this happens quite often and is probably responsible for a lot of the misinformation out there.

Why do cat rigs load easier? Properly rigged cat trailers have twin bunks for the twin hulls, and when the bows hit them the boat is forced to line up properly along two points, instead of one. When a mono's hull greets the trailer the bow acts as a single pivot point, and is easily thrown out of alignment by the wind, current, or operator error. Not so, with multiple points of contact. Many cat trailers also have inner bunks which grab the hulls inside of the tunnel, and help to center the boat even more effectively.

Another often overlooked factor is the height of your out drives over the pavement. While outboard engines on V-hulls are centered over the lowest possible point of the hull, which sits at the lowest point on the trailer, cats carry their outboards off to the sides and they're usually well elevated. You forgot to tilt those engines up before yanking the trailer up the ramp? On some boats that can be a skeg-ripping, prop-killing event, but on cat rigs it's usually a non-issue.

There is a down-side to trailering cat rigs, though. Foot for foot they tend to be heavier then monos, so your load goes up even though LOA doesn't. Of course, we could also talk about how much more square-footage per LOA cats have versus monohulls, but that's a topic for another day.

Tilted all the way down (which puts the least amount of stress on your boat when trailering) the cat’s lower units are above the trailer frame. Not so for the monohull, even though it’s tilted up slightly.