I was hoping to pick up some tips on how to get your boat off the racks when straps and ropes are iced on. I suppose the usual suspects: hot water or blow dryers. Any better approaches? Turning around and driving back to Florida could have worked, but that wasn’t in the cards.
Leave it in the sun… Even at zero the ice will sublimate. It was 6 here last week. In the sun the thermometer taunted us with fake news …60
@BoozTalkin said:
I was hoping to pick up some tips on how to get your boat off the racks when straps and ropes are iced on. I suppose the usual suspects: hot water or blow dryers. Any better approaches? Turning around and driving back to Florida could have worked, but that wasn’t in the cards.
Go to the do it yourself carwash
@Chuck von Yamashita said:
@BoozTalkin said:
I was hoping to pick up some tips on how to get your boat off the racks when straps and ropes are iced on. I suppose the usual suspects: hot water or blow dryers. Any better approaches? Turning around and driving back to Florida could have worked, but that wasn’t in the cards.Go to the do it yourself carwash
Don’t try that here… As soon as you leave the car wash the ropes will freeze again. That is unless you want to travel at 55 mph with a boat just sitting on your roof… just saying…
There is a reason we do not go to the car wash in winter. Frozen doors are not fun. Frozen soapsuds are not fun.
But I realize this tactic may work for you not from the Real North. Just don’t try it at zero or below. We actually do dry our clothes outside below freezing… Its called sublimation and it works.
Or wait for the inevitable warm day… I surmise you don’t have to wait till April for above freezing temps.
@kayamedic said:
@Chuck von Yamashita said:
@BoozTalkin said:
I was hoping to pick up some tips on how to get your boat off the racks when straps and ropes are iced on. I suppose the usual suspects: hot water or blow dryers. Any better approaches? Turning around and driving back to Florida could have worked, but that wasn’t in the cards.Go to the do it yourself carwash
Don’t try that here… As soon as you leave the car wash the ropes will freeze again. That is unless you want to travel at 55 mph with a boat just sitting on your roof… just saying…
There is a reason we do not go to the car wash in winter. Frozen doors are not fun. Frozen soapsuds are not fun.
But I realize this tactic may work for you not from the Real North. Just don’t try it at zero or below. We actually do dry our clothes outside below freezing… Its called sublimation and it works.Or wait for the inevitable warm day… I surmise you don’t have to wait till April for above freezing temps.
I live at 61 deg North Latitude. I am further north than you are.
Well, if you really want to make sure…Wash it all off at the car wash, quickly REMOVE the wet ropes or straps, wait a few minutes for the boat and rack to dry, and then PUT ON A SPARE SET OF DRY STRAPS.
Or use a boat that will fit inside your vehicle and avoid the whole song and dance.
Add more salt. 
But seriously, I think @pikabike has it right here. Two sets of straps are the way to go. After winter paddling I don’t usually have a problem with the boat freezing onto the car because I take it off when I get home. However, it I had the issue I’d certainly do as pikabike has mentioned.
In winter I always bring the latest used set of straps/ropes inside to thoroughly dry out. I clean them when necessary, but up on the roof of the truck they don’t get that much road salt/grime. One set almost always stays in the truck just in case there’s a good boat deal to be had somewhere I want to be ready to go!
@BoozTalkin said: I’m feeling sorry for my northern paddling sisters and brothers. You have to put up with this crud all the time. And it is probably too cold to wash your boat out. I’m having a pity party for you!~~Chip"
Don’t worry about 'em. If they have to put up with this all the time they find solutions. For example, My Iowa relatives have hose bibs and floor drains in the garage.
We put up with ice and salt almost everyday but it’s usually in and around a glass and have to put up with Jimmy Buffett music… 
No need for pity. Rivers up here are usually open for paddling. If not there is skiing, snowshoeing, camping and ice fishing. Winter is one of the best times to be outdoors.
@BrianSnat said:
No need for pity. Rivers up here are usually open for paddling. If not there is skiing, snowshoeing, camping and ice fishing. Winter is one of the best times to be outdoors.
Right, what I hated was living in between where it was cold but not cold enough and not enough snow to go out and play in it.
Okay I confess, I’m the doubter who believes the climate will do what it will do and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’m counting on all the believers to save us though, just as they were able to save us from the Ice Age predicted by all the “experts” back in the seventies.
Rookie, great pic! I’ve seen some strange ice, but never a whorled unicorn horn like that!
Sometimes I see it as a giant shrimp trying to burrow into the frozen sand. On the other hand, Lake Michigan isn’t populated with shrimp but one never knows about unicorns hiding in the forests!
The Iceworm Cometh
From the icy stygian deep,
the horned iceworm did creep,
it froze in pose on beach,
this fluke of nature’s reach
@magooch said:
Okay I confess, I’m the doubter who believes the climate will do what it will do and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’m counting on all the believers to save us though, just as they were able to save us from the Ice Age predicted by all the “experts” back in the seventies.
No one is saying that it’s definitely possible to change the way things are going, but until now, that has never been your focus. Your argument has always been that no such change is happening (regardless of the reason) because you just looked out your window and saw this or that, and my response has always been to point out that in a dynamic system like our atmosphere, such single-point observations have no relevance.
We can argue about whether there’s anything any nation or group of nations can do, but steadfastly insisting that you know more about the subject than the vast majority of those who study this stuff for a living seems more like an expression of blind partisanship than of any actual thought process. On that note, I must say it pains me to see that a political party that once took great pride in looking to science for practical progress has quite suddenly become almost totally anti-science in all possible ways, just because of the political overtones of this particular topic.
By the way, regarding what you just said about the seventies, when I was in graduate school in the early 80s, my climatology professor, (who was older than dirt and had been studying climate and microclimate since the 40s) never said a thing to us about a coming ice age (I do remember some idea that an ice age might be coming in tens of thousands of years, but if it had been part of the mainstream scientific thought in the 70s that an ice age might be coming soon, he would have heard about it, so I suspect he did not considered it to be a well-founded, mainstream idea). What he did say was that the big concern among his colleagues was global warming, and that in his field, this had been steadily becoming more and more of a concern since they’d first found compelling evidence regarding the cause, and they’d been researching that all through the 60s and 70s! Of course, you already know that because I’ve told you this before (albeit in a more condensed form), yet once again you opted to fall back on a shred of weird, trendy stuff that hit the popular press for a while back in the day because it suits your purposes. After all, why pay attention to the scientists and the scientific process if you can cherry-pick contradictory nuggets from dubious sources to convince yourself that you must be smarter than they are.
My point has never been that the Earth’s climate doesn’t change; we know it has and it does. My only point of contention is that it has changed many times in the past without the help of mankind and it will continue to do so. No one knows what the normal Earth climate is,because man has only sampled a brief moment of it in relative terms.
I’m not a scientist, but l’m much more inclined to believe that the sun is the overwhelming driving force of climate and nothing we do is going to control that. Even if CO2 content in the atmosphere can be a mlnor modifier, exactly how are we going to regulate that? It seems to me and a lot of Earthlings that the agenda of the all knowing elites is to control us and how we live and concern about the climate is their methodology.
I’ve been around long enough to have experienced some variance in the climate and I much prefer warmer rather than colder.
CO2 layer is a heat magnifier… It traps heat… So there is way more than the simplistic though convenient thought of the sun The ocean is a heat sink too.
If you lived on the coast of Maine we have never seen such warming temps so fast in the Gulf for over a hundred years.
Its better to be proactive than an ostrich. The ostrich will drown and then there is nothing you can do about it… Calling names (elites) has nothing to do with what will happen. All it does make you feel good …for now.
Buy your lobster soon… They are fast migrating north.