Today was my first full use of my bike-canoe trailer setup. I’ve been looking forward to this for over two years. Last year I tried creating a cheapskate version using a stroller, a 2×2 board, an eyehook, zipties and yellow rope, but gave up after I realized there was a good chance of it collapsing while I was biking down the road. So this year I bought a Wike Heavy Duty canoe trailer. It’s solid cart that straps underneath the canoe, and a hitch that straps to the front seat of the canoe and hooks up to a hitch mounted on the bike.
I was a bit concerned that my neighbours may not like this monstrosity awkwardly cruising by their expensive street-parked cars, but I got only positive reactions from them. And cheesy jokes like “don’t look now, but you’re being followed.” When I got out to River Road I wondered if motorists would be unhappy with me cruising along the side of the road. Again, I was wrong. The first guy who came along gave me a thumbs-up, and I got a few waves.
I need to do a timed trial sometime, but it feels faster to bike my canoe to the water than to use my car. Loading the canoe onto the car, strapping it down, and then loading all the stuff into the car takes roughly as long as strapping the trailer to the canoe and loading up the canoe. The real time saver is at the park where I launch. Instead of unloading my canoe from the car and then portaging it to the water and then having to unload my car I just roll the fully loaded canoe to the water. My canoe is a fiberglass hunk of mass with a homemade yoke, if I had a Kevlar canoe with a portage yoke it might be different.
Driving the canoe trailer takes a bit of thought, but it’s not so different from driving a U-haul or Grandpa’s tractor. Start braking early, wide right turns, don’t whack stuff with the trailer. I feel like a Saskatchewananinian I every time I see a mild incline. River Road doesn’t have runaway truck lanes, so I need to be careful on the downslope. When I got to the water I chained my trailer and bike to a tree. I have now been liberated from needing a parking spot. Maybe I could put my trailer and bike in the canoe and just go.
The one potential problem I had was when I was getting out of the water and loading up the canoe. When I put the canoe on I flip it upside-down to position the cart, at the water I didn’t feel like unloading everything. So I put a rope up over a tree branch and used it like a crane to lift the canoe to slide the wheels under.
The weather was quite windy and the Rideau River is basically a wind-tunnel on the upper Long Reach, so I got spun around a couple of times while canoeing solo. Maintaining control is easy enough if I knife directly into the wind, but as soon as I do two bad strokes and get off-kilter the wind takes me. it would be more problematic if I was actually trying to go somewhere and not just having fun on the water. No audience, no worries.
Ian Weatherall 