Dave Uebele write: "I'm about ready to chuck the hully rollers and just have a couple of sets of these foam blocks that I can fit on over the basic bar set. cheaper and less hassle." Some years ago I transported a "heavy British heavy" a couple of hundred miles using "just" the commercailly available foam blocks. The result was a permanently dented kayak bottom - not enough to leak or enough to "oil-can", but enough to make me chagrined at my lack of planning. The foam blocks, in my case at least, didn't give support over a wide enough area of the boat's bottom. On a couple of later trips (some of us learn much slower than others) I had a lot of trouble with the commercial foam blocks wandering laterally over the length of the bars, and *not* holding the boat securely atop them during longer trips. Since then I've made a simple foam cradle using a piece of scrap marine plywood 3"X24", and 1/4" thickas a base, and dense 3 inch closed-cell foam (also scrap) cut (or patched) to the shape of the boat's bottom, with 3" thick extensions of the foam coming up along the sides of the boat. It took about 45 minutes to make this cradle using a saber saw, a bread knife to cut the foam, and contact cement (okay - some of us work slower than others too). The whole thing is bolted to the Yakima bars and can be removed or installed in less than a minute. Once bolted in place, it never moves. Tied onto the cradle with a good dacron rope, there is no way the boat can move laterally, or fore-and-aft. I do use a bowline for trips longer than a few blocks. The Yakima bars don't roll, but that may be because I'm tall enough to place the boat on top of the mini-van from the side rather than from the rear. On the other hand, I often slide the boat forward or aft in the cradle a foot or two, and the bars don't roll then either. This setup has held up well for over a season of fairly busy kayaking, quite of few trips of 250+ miles - no, that's car miles, not kayak miles :-). Bill Hansen *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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