Topic comes up often.
Here is how to eliminate 100% side slip fully guaranteed. You need cross bars that stick out beyond the roof rails, 2 straps/ropes per cross bar. The boat can NOT move side to side if the bars don’t move.
You do have a problem! Seems like your canoe is too wide. You should return it!
Just kidding. It does look like you have two problems, one being the movement itself and the other the damage to your roof rack finish caused by the movement.
I was going to suggest cutting a length of the plastic tubing suggested by another poster here so it will wrap most of the way around the rack bar [edit: because your bars aren’t round, probably just long enough to cover the top half would work better], and securing it to the bar using a zip-tie running through the tubing.
That would give you inexpensive stops on the inside of the gunwales, but your metal-on-metal problem would not be solved.
Maybe you could run a length of tubing along the top of the bar (parallel to the bar), with a zip-tie through the place where those little diagonal braces are, and another around the bar a few inches inside the gunwale? That would rely only on tubing-to-gunwale friction, so it’s doubtful that it would stop the motion, but it would protect the metal.
Maybe combine the two ideas? Something along the top of the bar for protection, and tubing-stop over/around that?
Ahoy captain. In your original post you mention “attaching a bow and stern line”. Since the front-to-rear span between your crossbars is relatively short (like many modern vehicles) your bow lines are very important in controlling boat movement. Are you using two separate bow lines? That’s far more secure than one.
We were just using 1 line that attached at 2 points. We just had the line looped over one of the handles. Should we beusing 2 seperate lines?
You need lines from the bow to the front bumper and from the stern to the rear bumper. For years people used rope with a trucker’s hitch which has a lot of friction and does not slip. Gunwale stops might help on a fancy modern rack. Cam straps are going slip. Rachet straps are tight but crunch canoes.
Looping one line thru a handle or such and then going to both sides will hold the canoe down, but it will still be able to move side to side. You don’t need two lines but you need to have the one line fixed where you connect it.
Until you get the width problem solved where only one side is down on the cross bar it will be an iffy question.
Yes, I recommend that you use 2 separate bow lines, each eith a trucker’s hitch as shown in my pic. I think you will be pleased with the result. I use only one line in the stern…I attach to a rear thwart (not the end of the canoe) to make sure the stern line pulls the boat rearward since the front lines pull the boat forward (as well as limiting side/side movement). You may need to play around to see if you need the extra security of two stern lines.
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Use of a rachet does not require one to use excessive force. Like someone else mentioned, I too am a belts and braces kind of guy. Taking into account the length of your canoe and the probable length of your rack I would like to change something I recommended. Use two lines on each end and tie out the ends of your car. (I hate it when I’m wrong!) Like most things, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Try some of the good ideas given by your friends here, figure out what works for you and get your canoe in the water. Happy paddling.
Note to ppine: Thanks again for your help in choosing my canoe.
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Two lines best for a canoe, but an intermediate step is to put a knot in the middle so that is a fixed point in the run of the bow line. I do that for short, non-highway speed trips.