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A few years back we missed a perfect day of fall sailing because I left the boom and mainsail behind in the garage! This was an unfortunate incident that I’ve vowed never to repeat again, but has left me with the desire to find a better way to ensure we take the boom with us on all future sailing excursions. Unfortunately, the boom will not fit inside our cabin. So we are left with storing it in our tow vehicle or on the trailer. The former option was what led us to forget the boom in the first place (i.e. I had taken it out of my truck to make room for other things, then forgot to put it back in before leaving for the weekend). Unfortunately, the latter was never quite satisfactory either. Bungee’ing the boom to the trailer always made me nervous about losing it underway. Additionally, the boom was getting pretty scratched up as it rode lashed to the trailer crossbeams. Thus I sought a better solution. What I came up with is the following “boom tube.” It’s made from 6” PVC tubing. Wanting to cut down on excess weight, I chose to use the thinner walled drain tubing rather than full schedule 40. Both ends are capped with female thread clean-out fittings that take a male threaded plug.
The tube is attached to the trailer using
a set of clamps I fabricated from square U-bolts and flexible plumbing bracket
material. When not in use, the sail is
rolled up and held to the boom with two ball-bungees. Then sail and boom are slid into the tube for
storage and transportation.
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This set-up is not without its
problems. For starters, the plugs don’t
seal the tube, so water enters the tube when I launch and retrieve the
boat. I wanted to keep the tube as dry
as possible, so I chose not to drill weep holes in the tube to let water
escape. However, I do need to empty the
water out of the tube when I retrieve the boat, which means that the sail gets
wet when I put the sail and boom back into the tube after use. Another problem is that the air-space in the
tube has the tendency to “float” the trailer off its left tire when
I retrieve the boat. This has never presented
a problem for retrieving the boat, but is somewhat unhandy. Despite these shortcomings, however, this
upgrade has been a vast improvement over how I previously stored the boom for trailering. The main
advantage is that I can leave the mainsail on the boom, which saves time during
setup and take-down.
