This Should Make Life Easier

Miss Terry and I love our Old Town Predator kayaks. While they are not the fastest kayaks on the water, they are strong and stable, and easy to maneuver. When we bought the kayaks, we also bought a Boonedox T-Bone Bed Extender to make it easier to carry them in the back of our short-bed Ford F-150 pickup. That has not worked out as well as we expected.

The kayaks weigh close to 90 pounds each, and lifting their bows high enough to slide it into the back of the pickup is hard on our bodies. But we just wrapped up a new project that should make life easier.

When I bought our third Old Town kayak, a Predator PDL, from a friend, it came with a trailer that he and I modified a bit to fit the kayak when he first bought it. It’s great for launching one kayak at a time, but we wanted to figure out a way to carry two at once.

I asked our neighbor Jesse Bolton for suggestions on how we might modify the trailer to carry two kayaks, and he came up with a couple of good ones. Jesse is one of those guys who can fix or build just about anything, and he brought home a square frame made of pipe used for a chainlink fence, cut it into two L shapes, and mounted them across the back of the kayak trailer. He also installed uprights to help keep the kayaks in place when loading them in the wind or in a current.

Then Jesse attached a reducer sleeve to the tongue of the trailer to hold the T-Bone. If the height of the T-Bone presents a problem, we can reconfigure things to just use its horizontal bar. And everything is bolted together, so if I never need to return the trailer to its original configuration, it will only take a few minutes.

In theory, we should be able to float both kayaks onto the trailer and, using a common tether attached to the front of each kayak, pull them onto the T-Bone with the trailer’s winch, and secure them with hold-down straps front and rear, and be ready to go. When launching, we should be able to back down our boat ramp and reverse the process. Easy peasy! If it works.

As we used to say in the Army, you can plan everything to the smallest detail, but it can all change the minute you put boots on the ground. There will be a water test soon to find out. Stay tuned.

Be sure to enter our latest Free Drawing. This week’s prize is a printed copy of The Trench Coat Chronicles, a short story anthology from several top-notch authors, with a blend of mystery and whimsy, along with characters from detectives, villans, and spies to flashers and femme fatales that you will enjoy getting to know.

To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening. Note: Due to high the shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with US addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – The apology may not be extinct, but it is high on the endangered species list.