It will depend upon how much weight is on the tongue. Air bags level the body only they do not shift weight back onto the front wheels. At 10% tongue weight you will have 800-900 lbs on the hitch which will remove weight from the front tires. To resolve the steering safety problem you need a WDH. The question is how much tongue weight will the loaded trailer have? I don't own a boat but know they tend to be lighter on the tongue with more weight over the trailer axles than a travel trailer. If the tongue weight turns out to be closer to 5% I would say you would not need a WDH regardless of the total trailer weight. That only leaves the specs on your truck as to whether it can safely tow 8K - 9K lbs. To determine that we would need to see the weight stickers from the driver's side door pillar.

 

 

Ford says loud and clear that you need a weight distributing (WD) hitch for any trailer with a tongue weight of more than 500 pounds. They make no exceptions, not for boats trailers or any other kind of trailer. I would rely on the engineers at Ford before I complied with the advice of anyone in a boat dealership. The 500 pounds max TW or 5,000 pounds max gross trailer weight spec for an F-150 is not only on the receiver, but also in the Ford RV and Trailer Towing Guide.

If your boat trailer is so cheap that you cannot tow your boat with a WD hitch without bending the frame (or the pole tongue with a pole-tongue adapter for the WD hitch), then you need a better trailer. Boat manufacturers and dealers tend to match the new boat to the cheapest trailer they can find. Insist on a better trailer than the "standard" trailer they want to sell you for that boat.

And don't believe that any tongue weight (TW) less than 10% of gross trailer weight is acceptable. Load the boat on the trailer so you have at least 10% TW. Less than 10% TW increases the probability of trailer sway. That may require moving the trailer axles back. With a boat trailer wet and loaded to 9k, that's at least 900 pounds TW. Use a tongue-weight scale to be sure you have at least 10% TW. That's almost double the max TW that Ford says you can have without a WD hitch.

 

The trailer can handle an 8-9k Lb boat, but can't handle 300-400 Lb from a WDH? I need help understanding that one.

 

First off, Ford when setting those parameters(smoky) is using the 10% TW as a guideline so that someone towing a box trailer, RV or flatbed doesn't go so tongue light as to cause issues. Boats are a whole different animal. To call a specifically engineered trailer on a boat cheap because it's not designed to use a WDH is very shortsighted almost to the point of ignorance. The trailer companies also have very highly trained engineers who design products to work in a certain way. If the trailer as I suspect is closer to 450 to 500lbs of tongue weight the OP will be fine. Boats are often in the 5% range on tongue weight. The aluminum pole tongue trailer designers know what they are doing and design the trailers to haul the weight while keeping the tongue weights down. To the OP, check the tongue weight I bet you will find it's way closer to 500lbs than you think than 800 or 900. Its undoubtedly a tandem axle and has most of the weight sitting right on the axles and down low between the tires with a V shaped frame to keep the center of gravity as low as possible.

 

 

You should be fine. Not sure how the truck is set up, but you may not even need bags at a 500lb tongue weight 10lbs one way or the other won't really matter much. Ford is concerned with weight on the hitch raising the front end and lifting weight off the steering tires. The hitch itself doesn't care 1000lbs pulling down on it is 1000lbs regardless of if a WDH is used or not. The WDH just unloads the weight from the rear axle back to the front one, and partly to the trailer. I would hook it up and try it or a similar one to make sure.

 

 

Then you're not paying attention. Most boat trailers have a pole tongue. Granted, you cannot hook up a WD hitch on a pole tongue until after you install a pole tongue adapter on the tongue. But pole tongue adapters are available from several sources. For example if you want a really good sway control WD hitch, you might chose an Equal-I-Zer. which works just fine with surge brakes. And Equal-I-Zer makes a pole tongue adapter.
https://www.equalizerhitch.com/manua...tongue-adaptor

Scroll down to the bottom of that page to see the adapter installed with the hitch.