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The answer to the question, sombody forget to ask


WME

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To me this is an interesting topic you bring up as I have been pondering how I might improve the integration of a canoe (or any 4 person boat really) with a 'YoterHome. 

What a beautiful and elegant boat that is!  A piece of art as much as a boat.  I would never have conceived of such a thing, and then the incredible craftsmanship on top of the innovative design!  Goodness, it makes my red-neck canoe portage methods look all the worse!  For those who didn't check the link yet, this is the object in question:

sws-sectional--jeremy-woodard_as-furniture.jpg.2fee920160903e798642eadf916df623.jpg  sws-sectional--jeffrey-hoeper.jpg.25349d48e8999f5fc22f378386b21cf4.jpg

You could pack that thing up into the top over-cab bunk and off you go!  Unfortunately at $2200 for the completed boat or $1315 for the kit that far exceeds my budget for such things.  Still, that's not a bad price at all for what it is.

Now, (brace yourself) contrast that with my hand-me-down canoe that is crudely strapped to the top of my 'YoterHome:

IMG_20190623_095406.jpg.9ac8a1e662903dcc336d5c1a162017a3.jpg

My goodness, what a mess.  But it's the only way I can manage to take the canoe with us without a trailer.  We have a system where two people can get it up and down and it's (mostly) secure when traveling. (note the strap hook points are "eye-hooks" like one would use in a pickup truck bed attached by swapping the eye-hook with a bolt on the metal roof supports)  It works, but it's a sail on the highway and kind of a little embarrassing on the road, but I am in Georgia so I don't get too many looks.  We took it out last weekend for a nice trip down the Chattahoochee river while we boondocked at a county park right on the river bank.  Quite nice, despite the heat and humidity.  

As an aside, the reason I took the picture above was to document the mud I got into that day. We had camped in a field the night before in a WMA (Wildlife Management Area - free boondocking with a fishing or hunting permit).  It rained really hard the night before and I took an untested dirt road to the next fishing site.  Unfortunately we got to a point where we couldn't go back (no room to turn around) but going forward was a muddy river of road that had just been carved up by some good 'ol boys a few hours before just off the main highyway (I was told later that I came across a super popular spot for mud driving post heavy rain...).  I had to plow forward and make it about a quarter mile to the main road, but it quickly became a real mess.  4 to 6 inches of mud and I was suddenly mud-bogging.  I have never had that camper so out of control.  almost 90 degrees to the road around a corner at one point.  It was a wide muddy road with deep ruts where the good 'ol boys had dug in as hard as they could and I was sliding across the road and bouncing across those ruts like that RV was the pickup truck it thinks it is.  I had to keep the pedal down or else I was never going to get started again.  It was get through or get stuck.  Fortunately I made it though, but it was really close to being stuck. 

I guess in hindsight it was pretty fun (my boys, 5 and 9, sure thought it was cool.  "Do it again Dad!") Yea, right.  Here's some detail to show you how much mud was flying at that point.  You don't stack that much mud onto the rear step unless you have the tires spinning...  

IMG_20190623_095051.jpg.1233ee1d5efddf9a8ca65c6c825e9a5e.jpg  IMG_20190623_095021.jpg.f85370c2bbc8fc927df598ebdb051a71.jpg

It's not like I was going to "crash", the only risk was just getting 'stuck'.  Overall I guess I wasn't all that worried about being pulled out of the mud because just a mile or two behind me we had just left a proper Southern Tractor Pull and there were like a dozens tractors like the one below that probably would have absolutely jumped at the chance to pull me out of the mud (note the roll cage - and see how the front wheels are clean the rears are dirty?  that's because the fronts hardly ever tough the ground when it pulls the sled cause it rides the 'wheely bars' in the back):

IMG_20190622_192831.jpg.07b3d0f6630230ee8fd42163e15ba10a.jpg

I showed my 'wheely bar' wheels to some of the tractor guys and they had a darn good laugh (really).:

IMG_20190302_092352416.jpg.0ee92e3c23b82ffbed8cf8d4fbee3187.jpg

The tractor guys wanted me to enter the "1-ton class" as a joke (they would have even paid my 'hook-up fee'), but I wasn't going to humiliate the 'ol 22RE by doing that.

Jeez, I think I've gone a bit off-topic...  sorry about that, WME.  I think we started with a super fancy take-apart canoe but I ended up somewhere totally unrelated and vastly less sophisticated....

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