MacGregorSailors.com

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Don't see a good place to put this so I'll start a new thread.

Here are the pictures as promised.

Here's the story. Four lane suburban hiway near Savannah, GA. Hiway had been freshly paved, probably the same day. Speed was about 30 mph. A garbage truck began to pull off the road in front of me, then stopped, ass end still well out on the hiway. There was traffic in the left lane; I had no choice but to stop. Quickly. The guy behind me also pulling his 26X with his Surburban, was unable to stop as quickly as I.

This is the result.

Note the other truck; totalled. My truck was undamaged; trailer undamaged except for the winch post and spare bracket. After checking with the Tohatsu guy and a fiberglass guy, I trailered the rest of the way to Homestead, put the spare prop on the motor, and two days later sailed to Bimini.

I have two axles and four wheel disk brakes on the trailer. When I stepped on the brakes, I stopped. The other guy had standard single axle, standard brakes. He commented when he hit the brakes, it felt like he was on ice.

Double stopping power would be very very nice to have.
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Chip, your Mac26X trailer's winch post did a spectacular job absorbing energy! I think that's what saved your boat from much worse damage. The Mac26X trailer design has some good things going for it... it is the crumple zone!
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I had a near miss or two towing my Mac26X when I would have liked very much to be able to stop in less distance. My Trooper's wheels were smoking once on an emergency stop from about 50mph, they kept on working and not fading, and I stopped in a straight line in good enough time, just all that smoke was not encouraging (The 1995 Trooper only had ABS in the rear, the front tires locked up and smoked in two big clouds, my 2001 trooper has 4 wheel ABS, but never had such an emergnecy stop with the 2001 yet. Troopers have 4 wheel disc brakes large enough that the original brake pads typically last 100K miles.). That's when I decided to swap to disc brakes on the trailer.

Chip,

Was this on the way to the '05 Conch Cruisers? If so, was the other guy also able to make the trip and even more important when are you Cruisers gonna update the site? Us wanna be cruisers are dying to hear the stories!

I haven't even bought my Mac yet and already I worry about the boneheads I'll have to share the roads with while towing her. Glad that your boat survived.

Jeff

Agree on the crumple zone effect. The damage to the bow was limited to primarily cosmetic and a couple deep gouges; some of those were due to the fact the bow was wedged against the winch bracket and one of the guide bars was rubbing when I towed the five miles from the accident site to the hotel. Probably about 600 lbs tongue weight with the boat way up there as well. At that point I had an attack of sanity and did the Mac bump in reverse in the hotel parking lot. Took me about six tries to get the boat back where it belonged on the trailer.

Shortly after the picture was snapped, I replaced the rope tie with a heavy duty ratchet strap looped around the front trailer crossmember and hooked to the bow eye on both sides, to keep the boat from coming through the back window if I had to stop quickly again.

That is my (former) Suburban. The most amazing thing here is that Chip and I both continued together and made the trip to Bimini. I had to buy a new car the next day in order to continue the trip. We ended up waiting for our friend Wade (Hunter 260) at the ramp. Wade had blown 5 tires on the way to Florida.

The full story is in my log of the trip.

That transom crack looks nasty!

That transom crack looks nasty!

Yes, and it had me pretty concerned. But I took it to the fiberglass guy who was recommended to me by two different marinas. He was a Georgia good 'ol boy with a number of pretty large (way more $$ than the Mac) nice looking boats in his parking lot to have work done.

He looked at it, jacked the motor back and forth, and pronounced, "it looks way worse than it is." I pressed him, telling him I was about to go offshore to Bimini and back. He said if he were me, he'd not hesitate, only cautioning me to avoid hole shots, and don't use all 50HP if I didn't need to.

The motor guy said almost exactly the same thing. In fact, he told me Tohatsus were pretty bulletproof, and that when he was in the Navy they'd run them in way worse shape than mine was for hundreds of hours without problems. In the meantime, they were apologetic, but since the shop couldn't fit me in right away they said they could have the parts shipped in overnight and were running me Xerox copies of the repair manual in case I decided to change it out myself.

With New York on the license plates and in big letters on the side of the boat, these guys both knew they were not going to get a bit of business from me; IMO this was the famed Southern hospitality at its best. If I had the names I'd provide references for our bretheren in the Savannah area. I may still have them written down somewhere and I'll see if I can find them.

John and Chip..... that is terrible. Sorry to hear about the accident. Oh well, it made a good story.

Appearance of the damage looks much WORSE that it probably is. But you were fortunate, no doubt. I noticed that you TRAILER your boat a great distance to FLORIDA. There seems to be a great interest in SAILING out of FLORIDA...something I sure would enjoy doing. There seems to be a lot of interests in MAC owners sailing to BIMINI...sounds like a real challenging trip.

The "TOUGHNESS" of the MAC is amazing. ALL that "BENT" iron on the front of the trailer...and the MAC survived. AMAZING !!!! AND, as I understand this MAC even SAILED to BIMINI "AS IS" ... AWESOME STORY by CHIP...and THANKS !!

Chip, Sorry to hear about your ordeal. It's hard enough to get underway without the added adventure. What's that black gizmo next to your ballast valve with the two wires running uo your stern?

What's that black gizmo next to your ballast valve with the two wires running uo your stern?

Its (mulitple choice test of skill)

1/ A gybing centerboard position sensor Seatalk interface

B/ Electric field connection - turns your hull blue for racing, white for trailering

iii/ Depth transducer and speed paddle interface

sqrt (16)/ An anchor light someone put in upside down in a rush to get yet another Mac out the door..

All's well that ends well. Set us back a bit; by the time we got to Bimini I had gone 72 hours with maybe five hours of sleep. Took me a couple days but Bimini isn't a bad place for that knd of recovery. If you read John Defino's log, you'll also note a story of me falling asleep while singlehanding the crossing. Happened a couple of times, but the autopilot was doing the steering, and as long as I had John to wake me up if I was about to collide with something...

Black gizmo is the transducer for the Standard Horizon "multi data" unit: paddle wheel speedo, depth and temp.