EX40 LIGHT

  The ideal design for ease of trailering might be to:

    - Keep the Ex40 windward and leeward hulls,
    - But skip the sunken cockpit and integrated tender, and instead
    - Go with the open deck and tramps seen on the earlier Ex40F,
    - With a motor on a sled under the windward hull, and
    - A removable or flip-up toybox next to the leeward hull.

  I don't /want/ to skip the beautiful cockpit, or the integrated tender, because they are extraordinary solutions for a 40' boat under 1,800 pounds, plus the tender solution is so elegant that it's painful to think about not implementing it.

  Alas, I'm so focused on the ease of getting the boat in and out of the water at a crowded boat ramp that I don't see the tender working out -- I want to be able to just drive onto a single trailer and then haul the boat over the the prep area to deal with the masts. 

  We'd use the tender so infrequently (once every few years?) that simplifying the main boat and going with an inflatable tender with a roll-up floor makes more sense than fiddling with the integrated tender.

  After switching over to trampolines, the next tasks are to figure out the toybox, motor, and winches.

  The toybox could be a slender 2' wide box along the leeward hull that could either be removed and ratchet-strapped to the leeward hull between the masts, or alternately, hinged to the leeward hull and flipped upside down on top of it between the masts.  Though if flipping, such as for a marina, it would have to have an open (or open-able) top and bottom section near the center to allow access to the leeward hull hatches. 

  If the sunken cockpit could be worked into that scheme, so much the better, but I'm not sure I see that happening for marinas.  It could be lifted out for trailering, but I'd want it to stay in place for marinas, and I think that might be asking too much in terms of getting down to 14' and still having easy access to both hulls.

  The motor could then be on a hinged sled under the main cockpit, being just aft of the aft beam when fully lifted, so:

    - The boat can easily be collapsed on the water for trailering or marinas
        - With a single set of fixed controls
        - Without having to disconnect or move controls or a tender
    - The motor won't interfere with the bunks, toybox, rudders, tillers, or tiller extensions
    - And it will still be relatively near the center of the boat.

  Winches then either get moved to the beams, or possibly to a transverse beam that pins into place when on the water, but gets unpinned and lifted out and strapped to the now-flipped toybox for trailering.

  And maybe we also save 200 pounds in the process, keeping the Bruce number at or above 2 when my wife and I are on board.

        - Mike