Hi Larry, If the pucker factor gets up to 9, I hope you had a change of underwear along! Loosing a trailer ball from the hitch , ...................Ouch! I think all of us have had "trailering" experiences, and learned the hard way what to do, or not do. In my case, when I bought a Bolger MICRO in Bay City, MI - sight unseen - and drove there to pick it up and then drive to Florida with the new toy I found, .............the trailer seems to have been made from a mobile home trailer. It must have weighed about1.5 times as much as the boat itself. The MICRO weighed about 1000 lbs; the trailer alone probably about 1500 lbs, for a total weight of 2500 lbs!! I was towing it with a 4 cylinder VW GOLF............ The next problem, discovered after 50 miles of driving on I-75 heading south, was that the keel of the MICRO was a long continual curve from bow to stern (rudder). It was sitting in a straight piece of channel which meant that the whole boat would rock on it's rocker (keel) as I hit bumps or braked. Temporary solution: Stop at the next truck tire tread I saw lying at the side of the road and cut pieces to jam under the keel to stop it from rocking. Next improvement: Stop at a Home Depot. Buy a saw and get a 2 x 4 that I could cut on a long diagonal to really jam it under the keel curve. It was held in place with a piece of heavy wire; also found on the roadside. We made it through the mountains of Tennessee - many times in 2nd gear - but we made it to Florida and then back to Connecticut. First chore then was to get a "proper sized; ....and weight" trailer for the MICRO. The heavy trailer was sold to a friend who uses it to haul a stock car from race to race............. Leigh Valley Tools in New York State sell a roll of Velcro tape to tie up plants for about $3.00. This is great stuff for tieing up halyards and shrouds on the mast while trailering. No fuss no muss: totally reusable. An indispensable trailering aid. I use it on my tiller extension to hold it in place while sailing. Connie