I guess I shouldn't say it FINALLY happened, as I just bought the boat in June. I pulled it home from Illinois, and then probably haven't even put 20 miles on it since (boat stays in the water). The failure happened while the boat was parked...I found that pretty strange as you would think a bump would cause a jolt to the axle and that would be how it would fail, not just sitting stationary. I was going to pull the boat to my father in law's pole barn for the winter, but when I hooked up and tried to pull away the wheels were completely locked up against the fenders.

Anyway, I understand my boat trailer is 7 years old, but this is obviously a very common issue and Boatmate did a pretty terrible job designing these trailers to use those axles (and Moomba did a terrible job selling a boat this heavy with a single axle trailer). I cringed every time I hit a bump on my way home from buying the boat.

I'll call Boatmate tomorrow, but I'm not really expecting anything from them from what I've read on this forum and others since mine's out of warranty. I assume they don't even make the axle, as I've seen "UFP" mentioned multiple times.

I wanted to ask you guys though, has anybody ever heard of the axle "flipping"? Some guy on another forum said if you back the boat up and the wheels are locked, it could "flip" the axle and all you had to do was take the trailing arm off and rotate it on the splines back to nominal position. From my very limited knowledge on torsion axles, I assume he means just rotating 90 degrees internally. Ok, so maybe this MIGHT work with a rubber torsion axle, but I don't think it could apply with a metal spring. Are these axles rubber or spring? Even if this was true, it rotated in there already once so I'm pretty sure it would do it again since there's already a failure point.

The only reason I think this might be a possibility is because, now I don't know why, but my tongue was fully compressed when I hooked the boat up today to pull it out. Maybe when I backed it in after winterizing it last weekend it might have happened. My lot I put it on is pretty muddy, maybe I backed it in and didn't realize the axle "flipped", but it would've had to happen exactly at the same time as I was done backing it up to my wheel chock, because it backed smoothly up to that point from what I remember. Seems improbable.

Also, do you guys think I could remove my fenders and get any miles out of it at all? I'd be afraid to even pull it up to the local trailer repair shop. The worst part of all of this is it's stuck on my muddy lake lot where I don't even have power to run a compressor or anything, and the mud makes it pretty difficult to jack it up and place jack stands (I tried, need more boards).