A Use for Waternoodles - bringing the kayak home

With the old kayak, for years my preferred, tried and true method of carrying it on the car was to place four foam pads (as pictured here) on the coaming boards and then place the craft upside down on the roof of the car. I would then tie two ropes over the canoe down to four gutter hooks as well as tie the bow and stern to the car frame below the bumpers. For years one could buy a canoe carrying kit made up of these four pads, yellow polypropylene rope and 4 automobile gutter hooks. Such a kit is still available today for about $35.00.

Note front ropes pull back while rear ropes pull forward

This summer however I had seen water noodles used instead of the foam pads for carrying canoes on cars, how ingenious. This distributes the load over a larger area of the car top and better protects the roof from making contact with the canoe.

Water noodles are colourful long flexible foam tubes used as flotation toys and are available from the dollar store for $1 or for $2 or $3 in regular stores.

Schuyler cut lengthwise slits into the water noodles and then pressed them onto the kayak coaming. We then put the kayak on the car roof and tied it down in the conventional method. This method is well shown in the following photos.

Water noodles, straps and gutter hooks

In this particular case, the convex curvature of the car top was rounder than the kayak coaming so we doubled up a bit of extra noodle at the ends. 

The tie down method used here is based on experience borrowed from a long time canoe outfitter near one of our Ontario Provincial Parks. It is simple, effective and inexpensive. To quote Leonardo da Vinci, "Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication." The technique is typically used for North American open canoes but works just as well with the kayak.

There are a number of important details that must be followed to make this installation secure.

Two point hitch

1. The lines tying the bow and stern to the frames of the front and back of the car must oppose each other equally in the forward and aft direction. In other words if the forward ropes pull backward then the aft ropes should pull forward equally and vise versa. Otherwise the canoe will shift forward or backward during travel and in so doing slacken all the ropes further risking the movement and untying of the canoe.

2. The fore and aft ropes must be properly tied and anchored to the canoe with a knot and not merely allowed to slip through the pad eyes. This ensures that the craft will not shift from side to side. I found it easy to use a simple overhand loop that I tied in the middle of the rope.

More Details on the Tie down Method

Knots: Again keeping the installation simple, the only two knots required are the overhand loop and the half hitch. These are neither elegant nor sophisticated but do the trick quite well and are very easy to remember.

Overhand loop

The overhand loop is pictured here in a photo borrowed from Overhand loop knot where the knots are well described.

The half hitch pictured here is borrowed from Wikipedia.

To tie the canoe to the front and back of the car use a rope that is about the same length as the kayak ~ 5.5M or 18 feet. Larger vehicles may require longer ropes. These are typically used as lines to tie up the kayak when in use and floating.

Half hitch

At the midpoint of the rope tie an overhand loop. Pass the loop trough the pad eye or ring or cleat what have you on the kayak and then pass the ropes through the emerged loop. This then looks like a lanyard hitch around the pad eye.

Then create a two point hitch to the car. Do not make only a one point hitch to the center of the car since this will allow the kayak to shift in a strong cross wind. So what do we tie it to? North American cars have holes drilling into the frame under the car (likely to accommodate tie down hooks for ferries), while most cars  that are imported to North American have convenient steel eyes welded to the frames in all four corners. This is likely because the imported cars needed to be tied down for long voyages when imported on freight vessels.

So for North American Cars you will need to buy 4 "S" shaped hooks to hook into the frame holes. These hooks can be found at any hardware store.

Overhand loop and hitches

Pull the rope down through the steel eye or S-hook and then back up. Make an overhand loop knot at a convenient location in the upper part of the rope. Pull the working end up through the made loop, pull it back down and tie it back around itself with a number of half hitches. This is effectively a reef knot or granny knot. This method gives one a tremendous amount of mechanical advantage by pulling up thus allowing a very tight fit. In these pictures the rope was so tight that when we plucked it, it sounded like a bass guitar.

Repeat this process for each of the four ropes. The ropes at the back of the car will be much tighter than the front, but the front should be tight also.

Be sure to tie up the ends of the rope and leave no more than a couple of centimeters or an inch loose at the end. If the end is too long it will flap against the car and can severely damage the paint surface besides making the annoying flapping noise.

This installation as described so far is quite adequate for a short haul of an hour or so. For our trip to Nova Scotia which required a full two days of travel over 1500 km we used additional straps or ropes and gutter hooks as an added precaution. Like combining belts and braces, either system will work on its own. There are also kits with flat straps with buckles and gutter hooks that work just as well.
Strap vibration tip: In the case of flat straps, at high speed one can get serious vibration in the straps due to wind. To avoid that just put a twist in the strap in the part that is vibrating. This will spoil the laminar flow of the air around the strap and stop the vibration completely.

The pictures taken here were the exact installation after the first day of the voyage.