We were talking about putting the airboats onto the trailer to pull them out of the water, on Boggers thread. It reminded me of something we used to do years ago that was almost comical since we had this down to a science.

I was always good at backing up a trailer, especially a long boat trailer, so it only took me one shot to get down the ramp where I needed it to be.

We had a 14 ft. aluminum boat with a 5 horse outboard. My son would drop me on the shore after fishing, and I would go get the car and trailer backed down the ramp and into the water . At the same time he would be running the boat onto the trailer, usually even before I got stopped. I would hit the brakes and pull it into drive in one motion, then go. We would be off the ramp and tying the boat down in the parking lot in about 30 seconds flat.

It worked even faster when we put the boat back in. He would ride in the boat as I would back in as fast as I could. I'd hit the brakes soon as the the boat hit the water, then pull the empty trailer back out. We sometimes watched other guys tie up the ramp ten or twenty minutes doing basically the same thing. Sometimes they watched us back down in and pull out in less time it took them to find their boat strap.

Once one guy was in line behind us to use the ramp, and expecting us to take ten minutes or more, he asked if we could hurry since he was late getting to a birthday dinner party for his kid. I said we'd do the best we could.

He watched us launch our boat in our normal fashion, his mouth wide open the whole time. As we pulled up into to the parking lot, he was still looking at us, shaking his head with a big smile and a thumbs up I think he might have forgot about his party

Dave