Nice rack! You are allowed to use as many straps as you like! I like using extra straps and I always bring a selection of extra straps & ropes and tie downs for peace of mind. I hope the boat is exactly what you want…it looks great in the pictures.
@TomL said:
Nice rack! You are allowed to use as many straps as you like! I like using extra straps and I always bring a selection of extra straps & ropes and tie downs for peace of mind. I hope the boat is exactly what you want…it looks great in the pictures.
I have “lots”. 
Towing and carrying are two aspects of driving that I’m particularly serious about. Should be less than 24 hours before the OT is at its new home, assuming there are no surprises.
I sent you my phone number just in case. Looks like I can learn from you regarding towing/carrying/racks. Have a great trip!
Picked it up. Looks as good in person as in pics. Will put up a set when we get home.
Congrats!
Congratulations. I hope you enjoy your new boat.
It has some beauty marks, but nothing that has penetrated the skin, and the inside is clean and smooth. This was a “BLEM”-ished model, but CL and eBay prices put it into the realm of reasonable deal. The seller waxed poetic about using 303 to keep it maintained.
The canoe didn’t budge on a 60 mile trip with 65+ Mph in some places. I’ll probably re-rig a little bit to make the carrying more specific to the canoe. The safari rack gave multiple opportunities for tie down, including lateral stability. The bow/stern tie downs may actually just move to the rack as well to protect against longitudinal mocement. If the rack goes somewhere (directly attached to the vehicle, not by crossbars or the factory rails), there is a catastrophic failure, not just an oops.
There are a couple of lakes that are an easy drive from here. Figure it will be worth starting where we don’t need to shuttle back and we can play tip-the-canoe-and-recover-too and get some basic handling practice. It’s in our backyard right now, but I’ve got a canoe hoist that I’ll try to get installed in the garage tomorrow.
Looks like you did well! That’s a good ol’ boat there, and what a nice way to get into paddling!
I’ve often thought about building a rack from scratch for my current boat-hauler which would attach to the roof via four large support pads in the way that your rack does. I’m also considering the same for a larger car that I would use more often if it had a rack, but in the mean time I’m still “cheating” by using the factory roof attachments on my only boat-hauling vehicle. On that note, since you are the kind of guy who goes the extra mile on racks and tie-downs, I’ll pass along a few hints you might like to try.
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When you have to deal with strong crosswinds during transport, or even just the nasty turbulence you’ll encounter at highway speed within the first several hundred feet behind a semi-trailer, you’ll find that centering the boat on the rack provides a lot less buffeting than centering it over the car itself (centering it over the car itself turns the boat into sort of a backwards weather vane with the long portion facing into the wind, and in that fashion it really reacts rather strongly in its “wish” to spin the other way around, and you’ll feel that as buffeting). Taking it one step further, putting the center of the boat about 1 to 1.5 feet behind the center of the rack provides a VERY noticeable additional improvement in how smoothly the boat rides up there. That means the boat hangs out the back a few more feet than it does with your current setup, but personally I’ve never had an issue with that, and it’s more than made up for by the smoother ride for the boat and reduced stress on rack attachments to the car.
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One way to use straps or rope to secure the boat against side-to-side movement on the rack is to wrap two separate loops around it from opposite sides. One loop starts on the left, wraps around the boat, and ties off on the left. The other does the same thing but from the right, and the boat can’t move either way because in trying to do so, one loop or the other will resist. In the following picture, you see three ropes wrapped around the boat. One is a standard tie-down that pulls it down against the cross bar, and the other two are opposing loops originating from opposite sides, pulling the boat tightly in opposing directions. You really only need this on the front cross bar, at least that’s true if the boat is “weather-vaned” a bit so it extends a little bit more rearward of the rack than forward, as described above.
- (that’s supposed to be a “3”, but some automated feature on this site keeps turning it back to a “1” after every attempt at changing it, as well as changing the indents. Sheesh). It’s good if the front and rear tie-downs oppose each other, such that if the boat moves rearward, the front ones resist, and if the boat moves forward, the rear ones resist. Thus, rear tie-downs work better in cooperation with the rest of the setup if they “lean forward” from where they attach to the car, and that means NOT attaching them to the very end of the boat, but to the main body somewhere. On a canoe, one of the thwarts usually serves nicely for this (a wide range of attachment locations on the boat works well, even parts of the boat that are well forward of the back of the car), but on the boat pictured below, which has no thwarts, I accomplish the same thing by attaching the rear “end tie-downs” to the oarlocks as shown (the rear bumper on that car is one I built myself, so it has anchor loops all over the place). With really good attachment of the boat to the rack, the front and rear tie-downs mainly serve as insurance in case of rack failure, though they’ll probably help a bit when crosswinds are really strong and the boat wants to creep very slightly off-center in spite of all the other tie-downs.
Thanks, @Guideboatguy . There really wasn’t any noticeable buffeting passing or being passed by semis which was really surprising. I am also planning on shifting backward a foot or so to better center in any case. That will also have the bow and stern line better opposed to each other after relocating the hood mounts. I may still just go straight to the rack for those, though. As far as I know, the bow and stern tie downs are wholly to prevent longitudinal movement, especially if heavy breaking is needed. Normal rails and crossbars would definitely gain a safety net, but there’s no moving parts or connections on mine.
The type of rack I have makes it really easy to add various clamps for a solid mechanical mount. I’m considering something that will do a dual role of lateral block as well as tie down. I prefer mechanical advantage wherever I can get it. In a perfect world, I’d have some form of clamshell mount and the straps would just be a secondary safety.
Too be fair, canoeing wasn’t even a remote consideration when I got the rack, but I’ll cheerfully take advantage of it.
Yakima makes load stops for round bars that should work on your rack if your bars are the same diameter as Yakima round bars…but you may already know of clamps for your rack that would serve the same purpose. 4 clamps or load stops will restrain your boat both side to side and also front to back since it’s widest in the middle. Then you still need some straps…but maybe not as many, especially for shorter trips, so it could save you some time that you could be spending on the water. So along with gbg’s advice you have a lot of great tie-down options!
You may want to reconsider the forces that the bow tie down (and less so, the stern tie down) are counteracting. If you were to attach directly back to the rack instead of down toward the hood or bumper, the boat is able to pull up the front of the rack with great leverage. This greatly increases the chance of damaging your boat or rack.
Your rack might take the extra strain if a large gust of wind tries to lift the bow, but can you be so sure the boat will?
I’ve had the bow/stern tie down discussion with lots of people and heard many reasons why people don’t use one or the other. My position remains that it is quick and easy, and gives a much better safety margin, so why not?
@rojhan said:
Thanks, @Guideboatguy . There really wasn’t any noticeable buffeting passing or being passed by semis which was really surprising. I am also planning on shifting backward a foot or so to better center in any case.
I’ve loaded my boat centered on the car for years (or at least more forward on an SUV), and never have had any issue. Looks like you have good bow lines, so I would leave it right where it is. Centered on the car vs. centered on the rack (or even hanging off the back) is something Guideboatguy and I have debated in the past. It this point I don’t either of us are going to change are minds, so I guess either way works. Congrats on the new boat.
@Sparky961 said:
Your rack might take the extra strain if a large gust of wind tries to lift the bow, but can you be so sure the boat will?
I was thinking primarily from the perspective of the load shifting. I had considered the affect of the canoe catching wind, but didn’t see any indication of that (although I had the bow straps…:)).
I’m much more interested in safe vs fast (putting up the straps). I’ll still likely relocate the hood tie downs, but will continue to use the bow and stern line.
@eckilson said:
I’ve loaded my boat centered on the car for years (or at least more forward on an SUV), and never have had any issue. Looks like you have good bow lines, so I would leave it right where it is. Centered on the car vs. centered on the rack (or even hanging off the back) is something Guideboatguy and I have debated in the past. It this point I don’t either of us are going to change are minds, so I guess either way works.
Well, two things that come to mind is that, the boat shown in my pics above has lots of vertical surface area at each end compared to most canoes, due to very high stems and a cheeky profile, so it indeed effectively wants to “steer” itself off to one side in strong cross winds, but it can happen with canoes too. I’ve been in cross winds so strong that the whole car gets “yanked by the front of the boat” to one side so that it actually leans a little and a good solid turn of the wheel is needed to stay in the lane, and that’s a case where my suggestion helps most of all. Another thing is that, as with most stuff, people have varying tolerances of what’s “good enough” for them, and without seeing any compelling need to change, they probably haven’t tried other ways more than a tiny bit, and maybe wouldn’t care if they did. That was well illustrated by what I saw from most of the people carrying canoes to and from the Boundary Waters last fall (Yikes). In any case, a couple other regular posters here have noticed the same thing as I have, but that doesn’t mean “it won’t work” the way Ekilson describes or that I wouldn’t trust him to carry my boat. Notice in my earlier post I said these were “hints” that “you might like to try”, or something like that. That leaves plenty of room for a person to experiment and make up their own mind, I believe.
Rojhan…congrats on the canoe purchase. A Royalex[-drivative] is a great way to go for your first canoe. Granted it is indeed heavy…but learning to paddle the material’s weight provides assuring resistance…in developing one’s balance when performing the many strokes one can use when doubling up. Just don’t try to accellerate from 0 to 15mph all at once…give yourself a few strokes+.
All the previous tie-down examples are great…and one additional tie, although for some…a PITA, is to use either two or four shorter lengths of line to tie each thwart to the nearest crossbar, maybe near a gunwale(or anywhere you can reach;-). Get each tie tight and it’ll prevent any sliding…forwards or backwards. Two work great but get four ties(two for each thwart…near the gunwale/gunnel) and knotted securely and the canoe isn’t going anywhere…when combined with the other standard ties.
Home, sweet home.
That’s about the only workable place in the garage to hang it, but I’m losing close to 12" in clearance with the way the hoist is setup. Is there enough strength to put a hook on both ends/both sides of the gunwale and get rid of the strap? “Somebody” is going to knock their head on that…
It’s best to support the canoe on the gunwales, and best of all to use a support that doesn’t pinch the boat, which usually means that the boat sits on a rigid bar. Using a sling, as you are doing, won’t pinch the boat if a spreader bar is attached above the boat, but that won’t solve your clearance issues, while using a rigid bar will, as illustrated in the two links below (there might be other ways, but this is a simple one).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/11908573@N00/albums/72157646635661100
https://www.flickr.com/photos/11908573@N00/albums/72157632265805412
For that wrap-around boat support shown in both links, clearance above the hull is reduced by roughly 16 inches compared to the off-the-shelf setup you have right now. Then, this can be reduced an additional two inches by replacing the center eye-bolt of the upper support bar with a U-bolt that is pulled flush against the wood, or roughly four or five more inches by replacing the upper 2x4 with a 1" x 1" bar of square steel tubing and tying the rope directly to it, with little blocks attached to the bar keep the rope from slipping away from the center (I’ve used both of these methods on various other canoe hoists to decrease wasted space above the boat even more than that already achieved by the rigid, wrap-around hanging bracket shown in those two links).
Then, since that second link shows a situation more like your garage, I wish I had pictures of the other hoist I put in that same garage. For that other hoist, instead of hanging the pulleys from eye hooks (which automatically wastes about three inches of space), I hung them from custom-built brackets that positioned the hanging eye of the pulley nearly flush against the 2x6 that the bracket attaches to (that would be the 2x4 piece of lumber that you attached to the ceiling). I have an extra bracket like that around somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll post a photo. I’m not sure if building one is something you could do, but you could improvise something that works exactly the same using two pieces of angle iron. Screw two short pieces of one-inch angle iron to that 2x4 on the ceiling, so that the vertical parts of the angle-iron pieces face each other and are about an inch apart. Drill a hole through both vertical faces, stick a bolt through there, and that’s what your pulley hangs on.
Using a small crank winch to gain your mechanical advantage instead of using pulleys in series would get rid of what appears to be about 8 to 10 more inches of wasted space.
Using a combination of these methods, you could hoist the canoe up so high that the bottom of the hull is only about four inches away from the piece of lumber that’s attached to the ceiling, and only about two inches away if you mounted a pulley wheel in the angle-iron bracket described above instead of a pre-built pulley that has its own hanging loop (but that last option is going to extremes).
As a side note, if one wished to duplicate the system shown in the second link, but with the same problem of the winch being too close to the lifting pulleys to put a “Y” in the rope to provide equal lifting at both ends of the boat, the solution to that problem is to route the line from the winch down and around a pulley at floor level, and then install the “Y” split running back upward. Someone pointed that out to me way back when I first posted those photos and I didn’t understand what he meant. Later, when I finally thought of the solution myself, I realized that that person had been trying to explain the same thing (anyone remember “Memphis” from the old P-net? That’s who had the idea first).
Thanks, @Guideboatguy. I’m going to experiment with re-arranging the sling. I’m planning on a rigid support on the bottom with a spreader at the top to keep the pressure off. I could also gain close to another 6" by moving the mounts above the joists and boxing in the drywall to keep it neat. There’s about 1-1/2’ of improvement in there somewhere.
I hang my Mad River right side up by the carry handles. I also ditched the factory hooks that came with the hoist kit and thru bolted (machine screws) a eyestrap to the lower block and put a snap shackle to the eyestrap.
Gained about 10" by redoing the mount. It’s still not quite tall enough to totally clear walking under it. I could gain another 4-5" by mounting above the joists, but manipulating it is becoming a bit of a hassle. Looking at building a canoe shed in the backyard for it. Protected from sun, but lots of ventilation.
