The cost of towing

[doke01]

Hi everyone,

We don't have a trailer for our R25 but we want to take our boat from the Jersey shore (near Sandy Hook, NJ) to the Chesapeake for a 2.5 week vacation. The total trip to pick up our boat at the ramp and drop it in at a ramp in Salem, NJ (so we can jump across the Delaware River to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal) is about 250 miles round trip (dropping us off and then picking us up again in 2.5 weeks). We received a quote of $4 per mile to have someone do this for us. Does anyone know if this is a fair price?

It would save us a minimum of three days travel down the Jersey shore and up the Delaware and at least one full tank of fuel so we would be able to enjoy exploring the Chesapeake for an additional 6 days!

Thanks,
Doug

 

[knotflying]

That sounds like a lot, but it is a relatively short run. Jerry, who owns ALTO told me about www.uship.com. I have not gone to the site yet, but you may want to see what they have to offer.

 

[Stella Maris]

We paid $2.50 per mile to have Karma (R-29) picked up in Port Orchard and hauled to Alameda California a distance of 800 miles. So yes, I would say $4.00 per mile is high considering that the folks that hauled our had to overnight before the drive north again.

 

[thataway]

I would say that is a fair price. They are picking the boat up at the ramp, launching it, then picking the boat back up in 2.5 weeks and launching again--a round trip so to say. This involves dead head both ways to get the truck trailer back. Most transporters have a schedule so they try and not run empty.

Sure beats buying even the cheapest of trucks and a $6,000 trailer.

 

[JerryE]

Doug,

Mike (Knotflying) is right about checking out USHIP: http://www.uship.com/. BTW-Mike, put up some more pictures of your new boat in your photo album. That light green hull looks fantastic! USHIP is an e-Bay like environment where you put up your job requirements to ship anything, and professional transporters reply with cost quotes. You might get 10-50 quotes listed on a bulletin board. You then communicate with them on the details and select the one that works best for cost, time frame, and service quality. Besides getting many competing bids (transporters see each other's bids) the best thing is that you can view a transporter's feedback; when you find someone with many recent perfect ratings, you feel pretty secure in shipping with them. There are hundreds of transporters who specialize in boats.

The site explains how to make sure they are properly insured and what all that means. It seems that most boat transporters top out at $100k in damages–once again we are an odd bunch addicted to trailerable boats often costing $150k-$230k. I have found that there is often little difference between hiring a transporter to come pull your boat on its own trailer vs. put the boat (or the boat AND the trailer) on a flatbed truck and pull it. You can even estimate what the costs might be for a proposed trip using the USHIP estimator. For example, from Port Monmouth, NJ (near Sandy Hook zip: 07758) to Salem, NJ (zip: 08079) is 115 miles each way. The estimator pulled up 10 prior transports around the country for 26' length boats which cost on average $330. Across the ten the cost ranged from $156 to $624. Anyway, it give you a rough idea, here's the estimator: http://www.uship.com/price_estimator.aspx.

You can also look up tranporters to see information. Here's the Company Snapshot (and feedback) on Sharp Yachts Transport who probably delivered your boat to your dealer: http://www.uship.com/profile/syss/. Corey Sharp carries $200k full value protection insurance and has a 100% positive feedback rating out of 43 transport jobs he has done since 04/08. That's pretty useful information in deciding who you want to move your boat! I want to move Alto from the St. Johns River just north of Orlando to Cape Cod, MA next month and then back again next winter, so this kind of system is invaluable. Check it out.

 

[thataway]

One word of caution about considering shiping a boat on a flat bed trailer, on the boat's own trailer. It is very likely that you will be over height--and that will not only occur some serious additional expenses but risks. I believe in this case, the owner does not have a trailer, so the shipper will have to have a trailer which is capable of ramp launch. Some transport trailers are not ramp launchable.

 

[wefings]

U ship is full of fly by nights that say they have insurance but cant seem to produce the paperwork to prove it . Get a copy BEFORE anyone touches your boat .If they have it they are usually under insured. Also be prepared to get a call that their truck "broke down" close to pick up date which is the common lie you will hear when they have not found a back haul yet . I recommend a hauler with a good reputation and avoiding the U ship nightmare . I tried it for a while and found it to be a joke . You get what you pay for !
Marc

 

[JerryE]

Marc,

All your points are valid about eBay as well. Any site connecting hundreds (maybe thousands) of potential buyers and sellers will have the flies buzzing around their heads. Due diligence is critical. An important component of USHIP is the feedback. When I hire a local transporter, the best I get is a few referrals I can call that HE PROVIDES, so I don't know if all are included. He will skip the ones that resulted in problems. Maybe even salt the recommendations with planted fake customers. Sure I can call a dealer for recommendations, and I got advice from Peter at Winter Yachts. But, schedules and distances don't always allow for this to work out. Also, its a hassle if you want competitive bids from, say, a dozen transporters.

After all, the example link I provided was for the Ranger Tug transporter (Sharp Yachts Transport) who probably delivered most or all of the Rangers to Wefings. I hired Corey to move my R25 from the dealer in Mobile, AL to Sanford, FL. He was well above the average cost on USHIP, but close enough to make me feel I wasn't gouged. It was still nice to see his feedback on USHIP.

When I bring the tug up to Cape Cod I'll invite Corey to bid on the job and hope his price fits somewhere reasonably in the range of other transporters. Frankly, there were some issues with even his outfit (he did not personally move my boat) to the point I could not recommend Sharp with 5 out of 5 stars. I'll make sure to have anyone I deal with fax me their insurance papers, which is good advice.

 

[knotflying]

Hey Jerry,
Instead of having the shipper fax you his insurance I would ask them to have you named as an additional insured and have the certificate sent to you by the broker. This way you are sure that the document you recieve is not bogus, plus being named an additional insured lets you deal directly with the insurance company if there is a problem.

 

[JerryE]

Mike, I studied up a bit more on all this. Much of the information below is directly from USHIP:

Any legal carrier should be authorized by the Federal Motor Carrier Authority and the Federal DOT. The website SAFER (http://www.safersys.org) allows you to look up your carrier by their MC and DOT license numbers. They charge $20 for a Comopany Safety Profile (CSP) which is emailed to the user within 72 hours. This is probably overkill, but for our boats is might be worth it. Before you buy the CSP consider doing the following:

The insurance issue is real. You will need additional insurance from the shipping company because your personal boat insurance probably won’t cover any professional transportation damages. You can look up a carrier’s insurance information on SAFER (http://www.safersys.org). Make sure they offer cargo insurance, as basic liability insurance won’t cover your boat. If their base insurance policy doesn’t cover your boat’s value, it may be a good idea to ask about purchasing additional coverage. I found it easy to look up a company's (snapshot) profle on USHIP which listed both DOT and MC numbers in the form of links. I'll call my own insurance company to see if my boat is covered during transport by someone else, too.

Clicking on the MC link on the USHIP snapshot for Sharp Yachts brought me up SAFER's database information as of 5/3/11 at 7:06AM detailing stuff like how many drivers they have, how much mileage they logged in 2009, what they ship, interstate or not, etc. Even crashes for the prior 24 months are listed and detailed. Their BIPD (bodily injury and property damage), Cargo and Bond insurance limits were on file. For Sharp they have $750,000 BIPD but no Cargo or Bond insurance on file, so that's a wake-up call to get copies of their Cargo Ins.–they advertise $200k but I'd still want to see a copy. Clicking on the DOT link at the USHIP snapshot brought up essentially the same information.

Whether you use USHIP to move a boat or not, you should use it for education. Their articles are excellent and train you as to the right questions to ask of a transporter, how to negotiate, what not to do, and how to prepare the boat for shipping, all about trailer prep, how to measure the boat, and advice for international shipping: http://www.uship.com/boats/articles/choosing-boat-carrier/. Also, use it for the snapshot background of any transporter you are considering along with the easy look up of their SAFER information by clicking on their DOT and MC numbers. Finally, the feedback aggregation is superb with detailed comments. The feedback on Sharp Yachts dated right to 2 weeks ago. Remember, Sharp can respond to negative feedback but they can't hide or remove it from USHIP's feedback page so you can read all 43 feedbacks dating all the way back to 06/20/08. Sure many shippers wouldn't bother with feedback, but you can be sure the disappointed ones probably would! They even list feedback from potential shippers that cancelled with Sharp, explaining why they did. Usually this is because they got a better bid.

There may well be 'fly by night' operators listed on USHIP, but they will have to have MC and DOT numbers so you won't find any guys making extra money with their 3/4 ton rigs on weekends. Aside from the normal risk of accidents all transporters face, I'd say if I hired a bad guy it would only be because I was too lazy/uninformed to check them out in detail or ask the right questions. USHIP helps the process immensely while saving money thru bids (if you go with one of their competitive bidders). I wouldn't blame USHIP for my folly, since they only provide information and recommendations from other shippers and government agencies (e.g., the FMCA and DOT). There's no way you could get all this stuff by calling a guy recommended by a friend or a boatyard based on experience with just one or a few moves. I'm impressed the more I study this site. How can you wind up with a 'fly by night' if they have no accidents, have 100% positive feedback over 40+ moves for the last three years, have a profile saying all they do is move boats, etc. And, you can get competitive bids from a bunch of these professionals. Just weed out any with even the slightest hint of a problem and communicate with the best of the bunch, only.