Re: Worst towing story or accident.
This one's mine from two years ago. Still hurts to tell it.<br /><br />At the end of my vacation I bring the boat back home from the cabin. The next day, last day of my vacation, I get up early to get the boat put to bed down where I keep it, because we're going to barbecue in the afternoon. First thing I do is call my insurance agent, because I had this nagging feeling all vacation that I forgot to renew my boat insurance -- no problem, I did it early in the year. Then I drive off to a self serve car wash to power wash the hull to get the gunk off the bottom. I get to the carwash and there's only one stall that I can back the trailer into because of all the angles and it's tought to line up the trailer with the stall. I finally line up the trailer to back in, and some joker pulls into the stall right in front of me then gets out with a challenging grin. I bite my tongue, don't want to lose that vacation relaxed feeling just yet, but I'm annoyed and I don't quite keep my cool. I throw the car in gear and head out onto the street. Problem is, I'd manouvered in so tight I couldn't make the turn with the trailer and I'm so mad I've forgotten I've got a boat on the back. BOOM. I just staved in my hull at the rubrail on a concrete wall. I get out to look at it, and the guy who stole my parking spot is laughing. It's my fault and I'm still trying to keep my vacation buzz so I take the high road again and slowly pull out and head for home trying to figure out how to fix the boat. Only trouble is, now I'm driving too fast while I think about what this is going to cost me and a few minutes later I'm bouncing down a bad stretch of road and blue smoke starts coming out the back. I''ve bent my trailer axle on the opposite side to where I did the hull in and one tire has caught against the fender and melted down. Now I'm still trying to keep my cool, so I go home, book it into a trailer shop and call a tow truck. They only have one flatbed that can do a boat on a trailer and I've got to go to the boat and wait for it because they have to fit me in between booked jobs and it could be any moment. Just enough time to call my isnurance broker to tell her I just had an accident with the boat after calling her out of the blue to check if its insured this morning. Sure, she says. Three hours at the side of the road later, I'm watching my boat bounce something awful on the trailer on this flatbed en route to the trailer shop where I end up replacing the springs while I'm replacing the axle, hubs and bearings (because the old one's don't fit the new axle). Then I'm buying a new tire. Then I'm over to the fiberglass place to fix the hull. Three weeks and $2,000 later, of which the insurance got some, I got to scrub all the gunk off the hull by hand because I never want to see a car wash again.
