And be careful not to dip into the water with the rear body of the car at all, there is a battery back there with a large vent hole behind the bumper.

 

Good point!

 

Really? even with FWD, at say 1k lbs, you'd need to be on ice not to be able to pull this think out of the water. That would be only about 100 to 120 lbs on the tongue. You still have a good amount of weight over the drive wheels (engine/trans) to offset the 100-120 lbs of tongue weight.

 

Just got back from our vacation and road trip with the Seadoo. The HHR did great pulling the Seadoo. I didn't have any issue with the boat launches. I ended up using three different launces at this lake. The first was a decent launch but a little too busy so I ended up finding a really nice, small launch at the end of one of the roads that nobody used. That launch was really nice as well because it was very flat and only the portion in the water dropped off. When I was using that launch I didn't have to get my rear tires, bumper or muffler near the water line. It was super easy to pull out of the water at that launch.

At the end of the week we had some starter issues with the Seadoo and couldn't get back to that launch so I had to use a very steep launch that one of our neighbours had on his property. I had my reservations because of the slope but I made it out without issue.

The HHR did a great job pulling the Seadoo on the highway. The route for our vacation required us to travel through a couple major mountain passes in the Canadian Rockies and it had quite a few long and steep hills. A couple of those hills really made the HHR work but I took it easy and didn't mind losing a bit of speed up the hills. Managed to get decent fuel economy of 26mpg at an average of about 60mph.