Launching at low water without losing the trailer

What happens as the water drops

Ramps are built to a design low. Below it, three things go wrong at once: the concrete ends and you are backing onto whatever was underneath it, the slope often steepens where the apron was cut, and the exposed section is covered in the algae that was underwater last week. The end of the concrete is rarely marked and rarely visible from the driver's seat.

• Walk it first. Thirty seconds looking at the toe of the ramp is worth more than any gauge reading.
• Reservoir drawdowns are scheduled, not weather-driven. A utility or Corps ramp can be unusable in a wet year because the pool was lowered on purpose.
• Watch for the lip. Where the slab ends there is often a drop of several inches — enough to catch a trailer wheel on recovery, when you cannot see it and are pulling uphill.
• Two-wheel drive plus algae plus a steep lip is how vehicles end up in the water. If you are alone, this is the moment to choose a different ramp.
• Where the level is genuinely marginal, launch and recover with the same water. A three-hour trip on a falling reservoir is a different recovery than the launch was.

Our ramp pages show a live gauge reading where a relevant gauge exists, with the distance to it. That tells you whether to go and look. It does not tell you the depth at the toe of the ramp, and nothing published anywhere does.