Dog-On Water Ramp

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Today we received the Dog-On Water Ramp that I mentioned in my latest Jim Hogg Park post. It looks really well designed and built, but I still have sticker shock over the absurd price of $399. It may can be arguably justified as due to their market monopoly and low production runs.

Regardless of price, I am impressed with it. I aired it up using an included Schrader adapter, which was somewhat bewildering. It isn’t a proper adapter, like you can buy for under $10 on Amazon, but a cobbled together contraption consisting of an incorrect adapter, a hand-cut piece of clear hose coated with oil, and press-in valve for a passenger car wheel. For the price I’m still in shock about, they should at least include a commercially available adapter and not something cobbled together from spare parts as an afterthought. It’s on par with the quality of things I put together for “temporary use” with junk I find the garage.

Other than that, everything really looks top notch.

Assembly is straight forward and everything should be collapsible without disassembly when the air is purged. It will take up a bit more space than full disassembly, but far less time, and I believe we can deal with the space. The air tubes are made of thick outer shells with separate bladders inside, accessible via a zipper. Straps and velcro hold the entire assembly together. It’s more polished than anything I would produce for cheap in my garage, but seeing it makes me wonder how close I could have gotten with a $100 budget on a bored Saturday afternoon.

Despite my qualms over price here, I think this is going to work extremely well for us and look forward to working with the dogs on it. I don’t think they’ll have any issues learning it, and believe they’ll be extremely confident in their ability to get on and off the boat without assistance in a safe and controlled manner, which is the ultimate goal here.

UPDATE

I decided to work on a method to attach it to the boat, and this is what I came up with:

I added two 6″ dock cleats to the back of the boat, and found two 10″ rubber straps that had S-hooks on the ends. I removed the hooks and threaded 550 cord through the eyes, cinching it so that they won’t open, and then ran the paracord through the connection points on the ramp and tied the ends with a blood knot on the bottom. The 10″ loops easily slip over the deck cleats with a little bit of stretching, but won’t come off on their own, even with quite a bit of motion. The 550 cord should be plenty strong to support the load here.