Manual boat-trailer winches are one of those set-and-forget things that we don’t often think about until something goes wrong – usually a simple case of forgetting the handle.
However, done right, a winch suited to your trailer will minimise the effort needed to load, and unload, a boat.
Hand-powered winches can vary in several ways.
The revolving speed of a winch handle is inversely related to how quickly it can pull a boat up onto the trailer, and the amount of effort you’ll need to expend to get it there.
In its most basic form, a winch will use a 1:1 ratio, which means for every rotation of the winch handle, the drum will make one full turn. Some modern winches include two-speed drums, with the second speed, usually 5:1, taking five turns of the winch handle for a single rotation of the drum.
If you’re looking at a big boat, chances are that it will have a third speed, a 10:1 ratio, so 10 turns of the handle for each rotation of the drum.
Speeds are selected via attaching the winch handle to shafts that progressively increase the winch’s gear ratio. Generally speaking, you’ll use the 1:1 gear to reel in slack line, the 5:1 gear to pull the boat onto the trailer, and the 10:1 gear once the entire hull is no longer floating all the boat’s weight is on the line.
A lightweight aluminium tinnie could get away with a 5:1 or even a 1:1 winch, as could a trailer that allows owners to drive their boat onto it. A 10:1 winch has some serious cranking power behind it, so is more suited to the bigger craft that need more careful, and more hands-on, loading.
Ensure that the winch you’re fitting is rated adequately for the weight of the boat it’s pulling out of the water.
Winches are sold with kilogram ratings. Exercise some caution, and build in a margin of error when replacing an old one; an 1800kg boat will happily work with a 1000kg winch, but by the time you factor in fuel, the passengers who insist on remaining onboard during the loading process, spare anchors and rodes, coolers full of ice and the catch of the day, and even a few extra litres of water making their way into the cabin on a rough, wind-blown day, you’ve overloaded it without realising.
Remember, you’re not lifting the boat against gravity, so the winch does not have to have a higher weight rating than the mass of the boat. In this instance, you’re pulling the load across gravity on what is hopefully a largely friction-free trailer set-up.
A safe bet is to factor in about half as much again in weight capacity; for an 1800kg boat, that’s a 1200kg winch. If you’re constantly launching out of steeper ramps or rougher conditions, bigger again is better.
Each method of attaching the boat to the winch has its upside and drawback.
Webbing is generally good enough for smaller boats, and very easy on your hands. However, it stretches, prolonged exposure to sunlight isn’t good for it, and it’s susceptible to fraying on the edges where it rubs on the sides of the drum.
Surprisingly, in this day and age, rope is an option. When we say rope, what we’re really talking about is what’s known as either Dyneema or Spectra, a synthetic material that’s surprisingly strong and has very little stretch. One advantage of using rope is that you can splice a fairlead into the end of it that is correctly rated for the weight you want to pull with it. Other plusses include the fact it floats, so if you drop the hook you can still retrieve the line, and when it snaps it will just fall, and not spring back like wire.
But you have to keep a wary eye on how Dyneema/Spectra wears. Any rough spots on the drum, and even where the teeth cut into the side of the drum, will be cruel to the fabric, and more so under load. Keep it as clean as possible by not letting it drag on the ground, inspect the full length of it every time it rolls off the drum for a retrieval, and replace it regularly.
Using a wire cable is the most common way to connect a winch with a boat. It’s strange stuff, and will try and twist under load as it stretches, stab you in the finger if one of the individual wires ever snaps (always wear gloves), and when it unexpectedly breaks under load, it does so violently. Wire cable also remembers its last position, so be prepared for it to spring back towards the winch if you don’t have a firm enough grasp on the hook when pulling it down to the boat. It won’t float, either, so be prepared to get wet retrieving it.
Wire cables need special care. When winding it on, ensure the cable is tightly coiled and free of kinks. If you do get a kink, that’s a potential point of catastrophic failure sometime in the future, so consider replacing it. If you don’t, at least when the cable starts to let go, they tend to do so slowly as individual wires snap under the strain. Once that last one snaps, though ...
The pawl is the latch that clicks over the drum’s teeth as you wind the boat on, stopping the strap, rope or cable from feeding back out under gravity by allowing the drum to wind only in one direction. Grease it up and ensure it clicks back freely from its open position, as there will be that one time you’ll forget to lock it in and gravity takes advantage of the opportunity. Or if the winch handle pops off when it is wound a bit too enthusiastically on the 10:1 ratio.
Never rely on the winch alone to secure the boat on the trailer. Back it up with a separate fixing point running to the trailer, such as a chain. You might notice other boats using a turnbuckle securing the bow of the boat with the bottom of the trailer to stop the deadrise sliding up the winch post if you need to brake in a hurry.
One of my favourite pastimes is collecting free winch handles that have dropped on the roads around boat ramps. A small investment in a winch handle holder commonly found on sail boats and mounted on the trailer’s winch post will save you a surprising amount of money and rob me of another opportunity to gloat.
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