In search of a trailer

[Mr Rickey Point]

Hello gang,

I've been kicking around on a little 16' Kent Ranger for the last couple of years on the Columbia River's Lake Roosevelt and now am stepping up to a real boat (it's got indoor plumbing!), a 1969 CAL 24. Now I can take the family out and not worry about who has the main sheet wrapped around their ankle. We are so excited. Only problem is that I need to find a trailer to bring it home on. I live in NE Washington State (the boat's in the Seattle area) and I have been having a heck of a time tracking down a decent trailer at ANY price, nevermind a decent price, in the WA, OR, ID area. This is where I'm hoping the knowledgeable lot of you can point me in the right direction of listings, resources, friends that have trailers...even people with snow sculptures of trailers would be more than I've found so far doing the usual searches online. Thanks for your help!

Mr Rickey Point

 

[sailingdog]

Are you looking to buy a trailer to keep the boat on or just borrow/rent one to transport the boat. There's a big difference. If it is just to transport the boat, you might see if there's a Cal 24 owner's association, and see if one of the owners has a trailer you might be able to rent/borrow.

 

[themacway]

rickey, if you can't find a boat trailer on the following site in or around the seattle area, i will be very surprised. there are many, many trailers where i live out here in the hot, dry west texas desert, so you'll find one most likely. they are literally everywhere out here. sometimes they have a 'free boat' attached to them that needs to be hauled off to the dump, but some enterprising folks take the old boats off the trailers and put them in a for sale situation at a lake's marina, without the trailer, and get what they can for them. this essentially will pay for your trailer or modifications to a stout 2 axle bass boat unit to get it ready for your cal 24. it's done all the time - i've done it several times myself. so here's a very good link for you:

www dot searchtempest dot commy (that's in code of course)

i went there, typed in a seattle zip code (98101), put in a 500 mile radius, and i got several hundred hits. it would take me all day to go through them all for you, so you might want to try that and just go from there. i found many boat trailers, old give-away boats on trailers you could convert, estate sale 'come and get its' etc. in those first few pages of listings. didn't even go to other cities/areas that were listed. it'll take you a while to sort them all out. good luck.
jack b in midland, tx usa

 

[Mr Rickey Point]

I didn't know about that search site - I was manually going through each listing and that was taking a lot of time. I'll check it out and see what I can come up with. The problem I'm running into is that there are far more boats in our area than trailers and the "buy the boat and trailer and get rid of the boat" scenario makes sense but is problematic since I live on the other side of the state from where the boat is and just have a two-day weekend window to go and pick it up. Thanks again for the help though - and wish me luck! ;-)
Mr. Rickey Point

 

[themacway]

you know, s/dog's right on the money with this. i just re-read his post and it makes perfect sense. if your boat is in salt water (likely, since it's in the sea-tac area), you might have some minimal or moderate bottom work to do on it anyway. s/dog knows his boats & boating as good or better than most of the folks around here, so if you could borrow a trailer (club/owner's group sourced?) to get it home, and put it up on borrowed jacks or the cradle that came with the boat (if any), by the time your boat work is done, you'd probably either have found a trailer or a local slip you like. aannndddddd, you'd have the club for the future to boot!
refresh my memory, cause it's probably wrong, but isn't there a lake attached or made by the fdr era grand coulee dam in your part of the state? if so, and if it's not too far (or another lake is close to you), couldn't you get in touch with a marina and either slip it (if it doesn't need anything below the water line), or cut a deal with them to put it up on the hard, in their yard to do your work? s/dog's comment about a 'club' for your boat might just be your ticket to getting it there, and some boat stands are surely available at a marina close to you, etc. i know that part of washington is not very heavily populated, and semi-arid, like west texas where i live, as we get about 10-14' rain per year, so i'd guess the boat slips wouldn't be 'too' high. could be wrong, but i bet you could get a real deal on one.
just a thought, jack b

 

[Mr Rickey Point]

Hi there,

Here's the update: I've searched for many hours on the internet and the best I've found is a Columbia 22 on a trailer in Boise, ID (475 miles away) - anybody want a Columbia with no trailer for cheap? I've called over 40 trailer dealers or people who might have anything to do with trailers, yatch clubs, marinas, people who people suggested might have an idea and so far have one lead (oh please, oh please!) at the Blue Water Yatch Club in Seattle who just sold a trailer like what I'm looking for and might have one more in the yard (waiting for the boss to come up out of a boat somehwere and let me know).

Your suggestion on the bottom work would normally be right on the money, but the boat I'm getting recently got a fresh coat of bottom paint, and even more recently got scrubbed, so it should be good to go. On the sail club front, all of our club's boats are pulled because of the river draw-down, including from our little marina, but I hadn't thought about going further south to a bigger marina that would have year round mooring to see if I could score a slip for a couple of months. Shouldn't be hard to do this time of year. And then I could make the final leg of the boat's journey home by water - how cool would that be! I hadn't thought of jack stands either. I might even be able to convince one of our club's member's to put their boat in a sling for the weekend and let me borrow their trailer and then bring it home and put it on some jacks.

One thing that I could really use is a schematic of the 1969 CAL 24 so that I know just how much keel I'll be working with - anybody have something like that or can point me in the right direction? I've been doing Google image searches and only found an owner's registry that had somebody with the same boat and I sent him an email, so we'll see if he's can help. I also saw the pic of the origianl promo piece in the forum here, but can't read the fine print. ;-)

Thanks for all your help so far - much appreciated. If you're ever up my way, it sounds like I owe you a few hours on the water!

 

[snapper33]

If yours is a swing keel I have a trailer I use to move my Oday 26. I'm in seattle. Call 269-744-0432.

 

[thebigpulse]

I don't know for sure where one is, I know a great way to search classifieds of many places at once though. Try crazedlist.org first, then oodle.com. I'm pretty sure I saw a trailer for the mac in california somewhere yesterday but don't remember exactly where.