A few months ago I went sailing the Outer Banks with a friend who has a boat which he had been keeping at a marina in North Carolina and living aboard. We were talking about how he would have to pay someone to drive his Bronco to wherever he decided to keep the boat next (he lives on it), as it is a full-keeled sailboat which cannot simply be put behind the Bronco on a trailer and towed. I remarked at the time that it would be great to have a towing vehicle that was small enough to be put ON the boat that it towed, which would then necessarily have to be big enough to carry the vehicle. That way, you could essentially go anywhere and have both a boat and road vehicle at your disposal. (I guess the trailer would also have to fit in the boat.)
Is this even possible? Could a boat be built that would be large enough to carry its own towing vehicle, but also small/light enough to be towed over the roads in the first place? The towing vehicle would have to have a lot of torque in the smallest possible package, and the boat would have to be built out of the lightest possible material that was also seaworthy and strong enough to hold the towing vehicle.
Someone else apparently asked this same question on Quora but it did not generate much of a discussion.
To tow a boat that can carry the car, you need a boat narrow enough to be taken on the street. This seems to be 8’6" width, in general. Which then means that the car probably needs to be about 2+ feet narrower than that.
Trucks that can pull boats seem to start in the 300 HP range but also tend to be big heavy vehicles themselves, adding weight beyond just the boat to tow. A 300 HP engine easily fits into a smaller form factor, e.g.:
That said, there are also some gearing, transmission, and structural components of being able to tow something. Possibly, having the extra weight may also be necessary in terms of having sufficient traction to be able to get moving at slow speeds, rather than spinning in place. But, I’m sure, you could easily engineer something up or modify something like the Atom (throwing some lead in the boot and extra structure) to work.
I don’t know what the weight is of these boats but I suspect that if you bought the atom and one of the narrow boats here:
You would probably be fairly well on your way to being able to pull it off. Hire an engineer and a welder and you would probably be all set in a couple of days.
I don’t know what you do with the trailer, though.
You didn’t mention the size of your friend’s boat but I would venture that any sailboat big enough to live on is probably too big to trailer except as an escorted wide load hauled by a semi tractor. For instance you could probably manage to live on a 32-footer, but as an example, a C&C 32 was a sloop with a sleek profile but still a 10.25 ft beam and a weight of nearly five tons. Considering the weight of the trailer itself contributing to the gross trailer weight, in my jurisdiction this would require the maximum Class V trailer hitch and a correspondingly hefty vehicle. So yes, you might be able to haul it, just barely, if you could deal with the oversize width problem. And that’s still a fairly small, sleek boat. Even the C&C 29 had a larger beam of 10.33 ft.
Correction to an earlier post that someone made that I based my comments on – I checked out of curiosity, and in my jurisdiction, at least, the maximum load width is 12 ft on 2-lane highways and 12.6 ft on multi-lane highways, so something like the C&C 32 would be legal to tow with a suitably hefty vehicle and the maximum trailer hitch specification. But that’s about the smallest sailboat I can imagine trying to live on. Anything bigger gets exponentially heavier – a 40-footer will typically weigh in at close to ten tons net.
All of this reminds me of when I bought my first sailboat, located in a fairly distant harbor, and looked at having it trucked to my local marina, mainly because I didn’t have a lot of sailing experience at the time. I eventually gave up and a friend and I sailed it home over the course of a week. It was actually a beautiful and memorable experience, with some “interesting” moments (particularly since this was before the era of marine GPS).
Seems easy to me: Picture a rectangular, flat bottomed boat just large enough to accept a smallish - say, 2000 lb - car. Such a boat could certainly be kept under 1000 lbs (boats routine carry more than twice their weight: picture 3 guys in a canoe).
Per SkyRangerRich’s suggestion, equip the boat with wheels and a trailer hitch, so it is trailerable behind the car (cars don’t struggle too badly to tow a trailer half their weight).
Making this anywhere near practical would be a serious challenge. Boat might need some sort of “tailgate transom” to get the car aboard - and then it could be hard to launch (perhaps use those wheels?).
It seems it would be possible to have a trailer that doubles as a raft, which the boat could tow. Have a small but powerful vehicle tow the whole thing on land–like a Jeep. Once the boat is launched. the trailer raft could flip around and be attached to the boat. Then the Jeep drives onto the raft. I would be surprised if a custom trailer shop could not make such a thing.
This was my idea as well. I’ve seen pontoon ferries used to carry farm equipment. Add a tow triangle (whatever that’s called), retractable wheels, brakes and brakelights and you’re not far off a working solution.
Assume a special build to accomplish it. A larger bike should be able to pull a decent sized canoe on a lightweight trailer. The bike should fit into the canoe.
Here’s another site with such boats, small aluminum landing craft, this one a seller of designs (which explains the few $k prices, that’s just for the design and use of their CAD software to cut the plates).
Some are shown carrying trucks which probably have towing capacities equal to the ~10,000# weight of the boat plus a trailer. Actually stowing the trailer on the truck/boat combination I agree would be an additional wrinkle. If the trailer could be broken down easily it might fit in the truck. Also it would be one thing for the truck to be physically able to tow the boat and trailer vs doing so routinely as normal traffic.
I’ve never heard of a boat/truck combination which actually operates this way. Small light landing craft are often used to carry a truck to a remote location for work, I’ve see many brochures and articles showing that. But if the truck then has to proceed over land to another body of water and cross that too, making the truck amphibious (like a WWII DUKW and modern counterparts) would seem more a straightforward solution than the truck being able to tow the boat to the next body of water.
I’ve known (and have seen) people towing a kayak (with wheels strapped on) with a bicycle, and carrying the bike (and “trailer”) on their kayak. Easier with a folding bike.
