EPUB-Upside Of Downsizing To A Trailerable Trawler

Description

REVIEW:
Passagemaker Magazine

Living the Dream
By Milt Baker

Reading this e-book, I couldn’t help but wonder how many cruisers might be tempted to follow the example set by Jim and Lisa Favors, a couple with thousands of miles of Great Loop cruising experience who, after five years of full-time living aboard, gave up their comfortable 40-foot trawler for a trailerable 27-foot Ranger Tugs.

Like many other PassageMaker readers, I’ve gone aboard boats like this at boat shows, asking myself whether my wife and I might someday want to downsize and try to squeeze into a smaller boat. A trawler yacht that can be towed over the highway and cruised in many different areas each year, avoiding long passages over water. After all, it’s a whole lot faster and cheaper to cover the distance between, say, Ft. Lauderdale and Halifax or San Diego and Seattle at 60mph, compared to displacement speeds. “One of the beauties of this plan,” the Favors wrote as they were planning their move, “is that we’d be able to cut out a lot of long boat travel days by driving to the heart of a spot and dropping the boat into the water.”

If the idea of a trailerable trawler has appeal and you’d like to know more, the Favors’ e-book is a great place for answers. While making the case for trading a larger boat for a smaller, trailerable one, Upside of Downsizing to a Trailerable Trawler walks readers through the most important considerations, including what kind of trailerable trawlers make the most sense (and why), a look at highway height and width restrictions for trailering, and what kind of towing vehicle is needed to handle a liveaboard trailerable trawler.

The Favors see their new boat offering them flexibility, mobility, and economy in much larger measures. “Being able to trailer our boat across the country would give us the kind of mobility we didn’t have with our 40-foot trawler,” they write.

They’re honest about the downsides. They realized living aboard would be more like camping, for example. “We were surprised and happy to find some nicely appointed interiors that offered a level of comfort we could live with and felt would be more than adequate for the shorter-term trips we planned to do in the future.”

From there we look over their shoulders as they work their way up the learning curve and master loading, towing, and launching, then operating the new boat on the water. “We wanted to trailer the boat without great restraints and restrictions,” they wrote. “This decision limited us to a width (without special permits) of 8.5 feet and a length of 29 feet or less.”

While a good editor might have helped focus the book, it’s nonetheless an excellent resource for anyone thinking about the possibility of a trailerable trawler. Upside of Downsizing to a Trailerable Trawler by Jim and Lisa Favors, $9.99 (Kindle edition) at www.amazon.com

“Trailerable boating is the wave of the future in boating and a choice more boaters will be making in years to come as it is a far more economical and flexible way to explore the myriad of divergent waterways in the United States and Canada.”  – Jim and Lisa Favors

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The Favors are members of AGLCA (America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association) and MTOA (Marine Trawler Owners’ Association), two popular national boating clubs. They served on AGLCA’s Advisory Council for six years and have been writers for BoatU.S. Cruising Logs for five years. They have authored two other books on boating When the Water Calls… We Follow (about the Great Loop boating adventure), and Women On Board Cruising (25 women share their experiences of long-distance cruising).