Challenge 1: Getting the boat onto the hard.

Sunday, 12th May 2013

The first challenge was getting the boat from its mooring at Wenderholm to the hard at Little Shoal Bay.

The traditional way of hauling boats out at Little Shoal Bay is to build a cradle.  The cradle is dragged out onto the mudflat at low tide.
The boat is floated onto the cradle at high tide.
The cradle with boat on it is dragged up onto the hard with a bulldozer the following low tide.

<photo of boats/cradles>

Due to a lack of organising and a worrying trend of time seemingly passing by faster and faster, we didnt have time to find wood, build a cradle and sail/motor the boat to Little Shoal Bay.

We instead decided to attempt to load the boat onto a trailer (it is a trailer sailer after all), drive down to Little Shoal Bay.  Somehow jack it off the trailer and onto some temporary blocks of wood.  We could worry about the rest of the process later.

Earlier in the week we had sourced some large wooden frames from a boat importer.  Ryan and Nic  helped drop them off in location ready for the weekend.

Nic provides a scale...

An early before sunrise start meant we had the boat on a trailer and ready to go by mid-morning.
Getting the existing boat off the trailer so we could use it had already resulted in much musical chairs and freezing cold pre-dawn swims.  We still don't know who to talk to when we rock up with a boat on a trailer looking for a place to put it, but it will all work out.

We needed some ingenuity to make it fit the trailer.

A fairly good fit.  She'll be right, we aren't going far..

We managed to jack the back off the trailer and support it.

while we inched the trailer out the front.

All finished.  And its only 7:00!  Plenty of time to somehow get the other boat back on the trailer and clean everything up before work in the morning.

Looking back towards town.