We have 2 Ascend D10 kayaks from Bass Pro. Have very much enjoyed them. They are very stable in the water and weight about 50# each. We have a one ton pickup 4X4 long bed with a camper shell. Have managed to figure out how to load ( which is quite a show in itself). They have only one central point and taper immediately toward the bow and stern. We’ve seen pictures and watched videos to see where the saddles should be placed but are still having issues. We are using a combination of Thule and Yakima bars and towers and saddles. The bars are about 28" apart and we are strapping both around the towers and an additional strap the goes in the opening in the tower and hooks to the inside of the boat. With the long bed of the truck and the kayaks being on top of the shell, there is no way we can add a tiedown to the front and back. We have a multitude of issues but the main is the tiedown and the placement of the saddles on the boats. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
But you are placing them on towers and bars on top of a shell. The Ascent D10 is a 10 ft boat. If you put the bar about the front of the cockpit and the aft bar about the middle to aft of the aft cargo compartment. It should have a large enough spread. Think supporting the middle 2/3s of the boat… Saddles need to be spaced under the hull. Straps need to be a loop under one bar up over the boat (both straps) and down under the other bar. Cam straps cinched tight. Not ratchet straps. If you can’t tie down a 10 ft boat that way without wiggle then you need to re-evaluate your configuration. Others will disagree but I got miles and miles.
I’ll see if I can get a picture of the strapping.
Try this. A blow up from the pic above. Generally you want the force of the strap to pull the boat down towards the bar into and firmly in the cradles.
Wow thanks so much for all the info. Really appreciated!,
When I had my NorthStar truck camper those towers minus the z clips were attached to “feet” that were screwed to the top of the camper. I assume your rack (s) are similarly attached to the shell. I also used a 4 ft step ladder to get up there to fasten the straps. a 5 or 6 ft would have been better.
Got the ladder and attached to the camper as you described. Using a pad on the edge of the camper; protects the camper and aides in sliding it forward on the rack.
If you can’t tie down the front and back ends, then it becomes important to have the support bars as far apart (as close to the ends of the kayak) as reasonably possible, and also to make sure your tiedowns are pulling down firmly on the kayak. The black tiedown straps you can buy from Yakima or Thule are great, but I’ve also used just lengths of rope. The key is to use rope with some stretch, and to pull it tight using a trucker’s hitch.
We use a setup very similar to Overstreet’s for our long sea kayak. We have Yakima Hully Rollers installed on the rear bar, which we placed quite close to the back of our truck canopy. To load, we start by having the tailgate open. I carry the front of the kayak and place it on the open tailgate, then climb up onto the tailgate, then lift the front up onto the Hully Rollers. My husband pushes the kayak forward until it is just about balanced on the rollers, then I keep it stable while he goes around to the front and stands on the truck floorboard in the extra-cab area. I push the kayak forward until he can grab the front and ease it down onto the front Yakima saddles, then we each tie down our end.
For a shorter kayak, you’d need a stepladder for the person in front, of course, as Overstreet said.
But we find it so much easier to carry our 70-pound 13-ft Hobie kayak in the pickup bed (with the tailgate down). You’d want a good bedliner to protect the truck; we cheaped out and used a sheet of Masonite, which isn’t that great. And of course we can’t really put anything else in the bed at the same time because of the risk of theft. But it’s SO worth it not to have to lift that heavy thing to the top of the truck! BTW, I bought a 7-ft security cable at Harbor Freight and use that, looped through the Mirage drive hole on the kayak, to lock the kayak to one of the truck’s rear tiedown fittings. We also have a 20-ft rope we ran through both the front and back truck-bed tiedown fittings on one side of the truck, with a carabiner tied to the end, that we hook to the bow handle before pushing the kayak forward, and then we can pull the extra rope from the back and tie off to the rear tiedown fitting (so the bow can be restrained from sliding sideways but nobody has to climb into the pickup bed). We make sure to secure the extra rope so it won’t drag on the highway!
Thank you very much Karen2. Loading ours sounds similar to what we do. Since we have a camper shell it’s not an option to put in the bed of the truck. Our bars are approx 28” apart. Our saddles are more of a flat piece of rubber than a cradle-like configuration. Our rack store suggested they be supporting the kayak rather than cradling it since when placed in that position they tend to shift. We have double strap tie downs for front and back and check them frequently. One strap is used under the bar and around the towers which seems to be a standard tie down method and the other is fed through the gap in the tower, goes under the boat and has a hook on the end that loops over the edge of the boat and hooks on the ledge inside the kayak. Both cinch down tight. We like your use of the rope and carabiner.
one problem with the illustrated truck mount is that the cab and bed move differently so while the cab moved to the right, the bed to the left and the kayak is twisted.
Better to put a frame at the front of the bed and tie it to the bed only.
@RikJohnson said:
one problem with the illustrated truck mount is that the cab and bed move differently so while the cab moved to the right, the bed to the left and the kayak is twisted.
Better to put a frame at the front of the bed and tie it to the bed only.
That’s something I have mentioned a number of times over the years here, sometimes to be told the idea is wrong by people who haven’t noticed the differential motion (because ignorance of how much movement there is between box and cab seems to be proof that there is none). I’ll point out that another type of motion is a shortening-lengthening distance between cross bars. Also, whatever motion you see at the top of the box is roughly doubled at roof-top height, so this is not an issue to be ignored.
In a pinch, one reasonable solution would be to make the tie-down quite tight at one cross bar and quite loose at the other (it would be best for the tight one to be in front because of how wind-loading works), but the solution you provided is best (and that could be modified with a front cross bar that’s cantilevered over the cab, as is done with many contractor overhead racks).
Well it’s this way you have to choose what your stress points are going to be. Differential cab/bed movement left/ right & fore/aft spread out between two mount points 8 ft apart. … Or… 6 ft of cantilever. It can’t go back any farther or it conflicts with trailer.
Remember too that the truck bed towers , Yakima and Thule , look ridged but there is some play.
Either way you have to remember this is an old fat guy driving so the violent 4x4 roads are out…drives like grandpa.
OP… If you have a shell and only 28" spread why isn’t the rack on the shell?
It’s not entirely an issue of how aggressively you drive. If you ever go up or down a steep driveway with one front wheel contacting the ramp before the other (the way it’s bound to happen most of the time), there can easily be 1.5 inches of change in dimensions between opposite corners of your rack. The change is less when measured in-line with the boat and truck, but another thing you can try is have someone in the back seat look out the back window and take a really close look at how much closer the edge of the box gets to the cab when you hit a pothole or go over a worn-out railroad crossing at high speed, then double that figure to account for what’s happening at roof-top height. I bet the dimension change is close to an inch on most half-ton trucks. I see that yours is a 3/4-ton but it doesn’t appear to be the model with the stronger frame (a heavy-duty model would flex less in a no-load condition). In any case, asking your bars to absorb that movement using the strength of your boat as the driving force isn’t what I’d choose to do, but I’m the kind of person who always thinks about how things like that work. A lot of people do carry boats in this manner.
on my vehicle, I use_ Shoreline Marine Propel hood Trunk tie-Down Loops_ that have a soft handle which you put under the hood, close the lid down and you have a loop to run your strap to the front of your kayak. They are very secure–they don’t shift and allow me to secure to the front of my vehicle. I would also think that you could use them on your tailgate with no issues. I really love them, and several of my friends bought them when they saw mine. I purchased mine through Amazon for about $14 a pair .
Here’s a photo of the setup we used to carry my (13-ft) Hobie Revolution 13 kayak from AZ to WA. The kayak was upside down; Hobie does not recommend carrying it upright unless you can spread the load over a large area (the bottom is not as strong as the gunwales are). We located our aluminum-angle supports at strong points on our shell, which luckily corresponded with the longest distance between supports that fit the kayak well (the front support has to go behind the front hatch).
Here’s a photo of the Hobie Revolution 13 in the bed of our truck. This is how we carried it to and from the launch locations (and shopping at Safeway etc.) during our winter in AZ. The photo was taken before we realized that the kayak would rub the paint off our tailgate(!), so the Masonite in the bed is not pulled out like it should have been.
RikJohnson and Guideboatguy, we have carried my 17-8" fiberglass sea kayak between AZ and WA (about 1500 miles), supported as shown in the photo below, without any problems. Nothing damaged, and the tiedown strap in front and rope in back stayed good and tight. Not sure why it wasn’t a problem, but it wasn’t.
On further thought, it seems to me the Yakima saddles have a good bit of flex in them. They are firmly attached to the bar below, and we tie the kayak tightly to the saddles at the top, but the saddles themselves are pretty flexible and I can picture them cushioning not only the bumps in the road but also any fore-and-aft or side-to-side attempted relative motion between the kayak and the bar.
@karen2 said:
Here’s a photo of the Hobie Revolution 13 in the bed of our truck. This is how we carried it to and from the launch locations (and shopping at Safeway etc.) during our winter in AZ. The photo was taken before we realized that the kayak would rub the paint off our tailgate(!), so the Masonite in the bed is not pulled out like it should have been.
Get a bed extender, aka lumber rack, I carry up to 16’ in the bed with no problems.
