Hurricane prep for toon...

[Jake_Daddy]

Hurricane Matthew was my first real hurricane I experienced as a pontoon owner. My boat is generally sitting on a lift, Banana River Merritt Island, and I didn't think that was the best idea with the possibility of a Cat 4 storm coming. I didn't have a lot of time to reference any proper procedures on what to do with the boat so I winged it and everything worked out. I trailered the boat to the house, strapped that mofo down to the trailer, left the truck hooked up to it with a piece of plywood underneath the wheel, strapped the cover down, threw a couple ground anchors in and threw some straps over the whole rig. Don't know if it would work for everybody but I was pretty happy. Probably had near 100mph winds in our area and didn't have any problems. Maybe this tidbit of info on the web will help somebody out one day!

Before...

[Jake_Daddy]

And after...

[jafo9]

glad you survived. i used to live in vero beach so we've been through several hurricanes. we never had to deal with a boat. just curious, i understand leaving the trailer hitched, but why leave the trailer jack deployed?

[joe20toon]

Jake, glad your boat made it through the hurricane. Excellent post on before and after pics! Hope there was no damage elsewhere.

[Jake_Daddy]

No serious damage to anything in my neighborhood, it's a good time to be in the fence and tree removal business. Others got it worse but nothing near as bad as expected.

The reason for kicking the jack out was because when I was tightening down the ground anchor straps it was fighting the truck suspension and I didn't want a situation where wind induced vibrations could have caused some weird dynamic loads on everything. (I do a lot of work with vibration isolation so I'm overly sensitive to that stuff) If I had a dual axel trailer I don't know that it would have been necessary. Another reason was if something happened where the truck bed got full of water I didn't want the bed to drop so much my straps would get loose. May have been overkill but end of the day all the straps were still nice and tight so I'm happy with it.

[Tums]

Glad to here you faired well.

Nothing quite like a loose strap sounding like Crocodile Dundee making a phone call during a hurricane.