Glenn-- If you have your canoes on
your van all the time, then gelcoat is a good investment. But after googling around, I haven’t found anything besides UV (and cosmic rays) that is a threat to boat resin.
It’s the resin holding the cloth together that is most threatened by UV. Carbon and glass cloth are not harmed. Kevlar gets darker and a little tougher in the short run, but almost certainly degrades from UV over the decades. Polyester cloth does pretty well, Nylon less so. But it is the resin that takes the UV hit.
And gelcoat is basically a resin. It is a sacrificial barrier to UV, and also ablates with scratching. But if your boats have to sit out most of the time, gelcoat is worth the weight.
Light Weight and Car-Topping
– Last Updated: Jun-04-09 1:52 PM EST –
There is not a great need for a light boat for easy car-topping. The reason for that is it SHOULD NOT be necessary to lift the canoe over your head using your arms, EVER, if you apply a bit if thought to your loading method.
All you need to do is devise method that allows you to lean the boat against the car or the rack itself, with the other end on the ground, and you are good to go. A canoe of "moderate weight" is pretty easy to get up onto your shoulders for carrying short distances. The trick is being able to load the boat onto your car roof with the boat on your shoulders, NOT lifting it with your arms.
I have my rear crossbar close enough to the back of the vehicle that I can walk up behind the car with the canoe on my shoulders, set the front of the canoe on the rear rack, then let the canoe down so the other end rests on the ground. Then I just lift the end that's on the ground and push the boat up onto the rack. Before I modified my rack so that the rear crossbar was far enough to the rear for that kind of loading, I built a clip-on crossbar that would serve the same purpose ONLY during loading and unloading, and be removed the rest of the time.
Another method that works really well, and can be done on ANY vehicle, is to attach two lengthwise bars, one on each side of the vehicle, which are connected to the ends of the front and rear crossbars. With that setup, you can lean the boat against the side of the car - against one of those lengthwise bars. Then you just push it up onto the roof, and at the same time pivot it around from its intial cross-wise orientation to the carrying position. This eliminates the need for the rear crossbar to be at the very back end of the vehicle. When I was a kid, we used that method exclusively for loading heavy rowboats (heavier than canoes, anyway) onto the roofrack on a full-size van. This method would allow easy loading of ANY canoe onto your SUV. This is by far the easiest and most versatile modification to a roof rack that you can make. Years ago, it was common for people to do this to their roof racks, and it makes no sense to me that the method has been almost totally "forgotten".