Meanderings : Cartopping Revisited

October-November 2005

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Alan Wilson

After much consideration, we sold our dear old boat this spring (to WaveLength readers Tim and Jayne of Nanaimo) and for the first time in many years we were faced with the problem of how to get our kayaks to the water. No longer could we just launch them over the side and paddle off. And we didn’t have roof racks for our car because we hadn’t cartopped since... umm, let’s see... the last century!

Finding roof racks to fit our little, fuel efficient but gutterless vehicle (I didn’t say ‘gutless’) proved a challenge. And the first, moderately-priced set of racks we purchased proved a total failure. So back to square one. It finally took a day trip to Victoria to find what we were looking for. We turned up at the shop of one of our clients, All Seasons Auto Racks (800-667-1032), and within an hour our car was sporting a nice new set of Yakima racks, professionally installed.

This was a good lesson for us. We wasted a lot of valuable holiday time and energy trying to solve this problem before finally deciding to go to the experts. And then it was so simple.

It was also great to see how rack technology has improved over the years, although, yes, they’re pricier now too, especially given the challenges of finding just the right roof clips to fit our little car.

Since then we’ve been happily visiting all our old haunts on Gabriola island, put-ins we haven’t used in years, especially the Descanso Bay Regional Park (250-247-8255) now that it’s under the management of our friends Deb and Jim (of Jim’s Kayaking) and their son Justin. This is a lovely, 40-acre wooded campsite with great access to prime paddling territory along the northwest side of Gabriola, and we recommend it highly. This is where we held the first two of our five Ocean Kayak Festivals which some of you will remember from 1993 and 1994, and it certainly brought back a lot of fond memories for us

. Launching at Drumbeg Park at the south end of Gabriola another day also reminded us of past pleasures. We paddled down the side of neighboring Valdes Island to a lovely area of flat, sandstone shoreline, then back home across the mouth of Gabriola Pass at full flood. (Hey, look, the land is moving!)

Then there was the paddle from Lock Bay to picturesque Entrance Island Lighthouse, with the tremendous view across Georgia Strait to the mainland mountains; the paddle from False Narrows, down to Link Island and through narrow Boat Passage; the paddle from sandy Pilot Bay where I took my first paddlestrokes many years ago after much urging from Peter Marcus of Gabriola Cycle and Kayak (thank you Peter!); and the paddle from Easthom Road near the ferry to the impressive Northumberland Cliffs on the west side of the Island. I could go on and on—places we haven’t paddled for years.

So what have we learned? Well, there’s something to be said for terrestrial mobility. It’s great to paddle from a mothership, but how often do you really get out on a big boat? Most boats tend to sit at the dock eleven months of the year, despite one’s best intentions. And if you always launch from the marina, as we did, it can get a tad boring to paddle in the same area all the time. So there’s a lot to be said for car-topping... that is, as long as you’ve got a good set of racks.

Yes, we plan to get back into mother-shipping once we have enough free time to make boat ownership worthwhile again. But in the meantime, we’ll be putting in here and there as the spirit moves us. And that’s actually something we’ve missed for many years.

To Tim and Jayne, paddlers who manage a very lovely housewares store in Nanaimo (‘Flying Fish’, located right across the street from the Georgia Strait Alliance office at the corner of Commercial and Bastion)—have fun with our... I mean, your boat. Happy mothershipping