How I Lift My 95-Pound Fishing Kayak onto My Car (Solo)

I don't know hey everyone welcome back to another episode of natty up north on today's episode I'm going to share with you all how I left my 95 pound kayak up and over my head and onto my car to transport it and I even do it without injuring myself or breaking anything every time I make a kayak fishing video I get a lot of questions from you all how I transport my kayak what system I used to get it on and off my car so I hope today's video can answer all those questions and I hope that you find it beneficial if you are new to this channel welcome aboard thanks in advance for watching this video my name is Natalie and it's up north because I make my home in Minnesota this channel is all about all kinds of outdoor adventure fishing hiking travel life experiences basically just living life to the fullest I hope that you enjoy this video and will subscribe for more returning subscribers hello again I wanted to take a quick minute to give a little update about my heart situation so if you guys watched the previous video that I posted I talked about how I was diagnosed with a heart condition and underwent a procedure to hopefully correct it one procedure was about six days ago almost a week now I'm feeling really great I am almost healed up and I actually have my follow-up appointment to make sure everything went well today with a doctor in just a few hours but right now feeling really good I'm up and on my feet and I wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you so much for all of the support I didn't know whether or not I really wanted to go public with this but I decided to and seriously all of you reaching out sharing your stories it really meant so much to me so thank you very much and for everybody who reached out saying that you've been through something similar or a loved one has or you're going through it right now I want you to know that I am sending my thoughts and prayers and best back to you too lastly before I jump into this video I want to encourage you all to stay until the end with me because at the end of this video I'm gonna fill you in on an adventure that I'm gonna be going on very soon God willing if I get approved to go which I should I have something pretty exciting coming up and I want to give you all a sneak peek alright so as I said today's video is all gonna be about how I get this kayak on top of my vehicle so this is a 2019 Hobie Outback and I have it on top of my car which is a Subaru Forester which is I guess probably a little bit shorter than me but in any case you can see I've got to get this kayak up and over my head to get it on top of the vehicle this video I'm not gonna walk through the kayak itself but if you want to see a full walkthrough of this kayak all the features and also how I set it up for fishing I will leave a link to a video that I did previously in the description below so the 2019 Outback comes designed so that you can take out a lot of the different things within the kayak to reduce weight when you lift it on and off your car so with everything in the kayak that's gonna mean like the chair and the pedal Drive and everything like that it's over a hundred pounds but when you strip it all down and get it on top of your car excuse me it is 85 pounds however as I said mine is about 95 pounds and the reason for that is I've done some installations I haven't talked about this much on the channel yet but I am partnered up with Garmin this year which I am very very excited about and I got a fish finder that I'm gonna be using this year and it mounts on top of the kayak with the transducer and everything like that goes within the kayak itself big thank you to Garmin for sending that I can't wait to put it to use this year and big thanks to the guys at high tempo in White Bear Lake where I bought the kayak they did the installation for me and it's looking really good so in a future video I will show you the Garmin and how I use it I've tested it out once and it's gonna be a game-changer but so moral of the story and how it applies today is my kayak is 95 pounds so I'm gonna start right now by unloading this kind of doing its reverse by taking it off my car then I'm gonna show you the roof rack the system that I used and then how I get it back on my car [Music] [Music] so this year I got this new device to help with my kayak load and unload and this is a unload wow I'm so Minnesotan um so this is a yakima roof rack loader i forget the exact name but i will put a link to this in the description below if you are interested in getting it this thing has been working really really well for me this year so you do need to have a roof rack on top of your car already to use this but when you buy this it took probably 45 minutes to install it it's kind of screwed in in a few different spots i had helped again from the guys at high tempo installing it so if you buy it at a hobby store they can probably do it right there for you but i was watching and it's pretty easy to do and it comes with instructions if you do it at home if you order it online so this is what i use and as you can see there's two center bars that go from front to back and you'll see in a moment those bars rest perfectly in the grooves however the 2018 or any other kayak that you might have whether it's a different brand or a different year they're all gonna be a little bit different the bars that go along your car from front to back they can go wider or a more narrow in order to fit with your kayak so something you just kind of have to play around with ahead of time i have these set pretty narrow I will say loading and unloading no there's very little room for error when they are this narrow because it means you have to have your kayak right perfectly on top of it if it's off to the left or off to the right it could slide and fall so I've gotten close a couple times but have been able to maneuver while I'm loading it on and I've never had it not work so this rack does go forwards okay forwards for when you are you don't have your kayak on top you a car so you can still open your trunk and those little red clamps snap it into place or you can pull it out words when you're loading your kayak and unloading it and you can leave it out like this when you're transporting it as you can see when it's back like this and when you have your kayak hanging off the back you can't really open your trunk so keep that in mind when you're loading your car before you go kayak fishing get after you want everything you need to go through a trunk rods and stuff like that in before you load up the yak okay so before I reload the kayak on the car I want to show you the old device that I've used I've included this in a video previously actually a couple times last year but I want to show it to you just as a point of reference so all of last year I used this rhino-rack which is a different system for loading and unloading so this piece right here hooks on to your roof rack I don't know you probably can't see it that well because of the roof rack with on it but you get the gist of it then this pole it's a telescoping pole slides in like this so you create kind of this L shape hanging off your car basically what you do is you lift your kayak up from one end set it on here shimmy the kayak onto your car and just kind of yeah shimmy it over and when you want to unload you do kind of the same thing show me half of it on top of this piece right here lower the front half down then lower the back half so I used this last year but I have to say this system is a little bit less foolproof but I think it completely depends on your roof rack this didn't snap in very well at all to my roof rack because there's lots were just too narrow on the roof rack that I have for this device so sometimes the whole thing would kind of shift the pole would fall down and it would be a little bit of a catastrophe with my kayak with half on my car half off I think to fight this device if you have it for the right roof rack works really well but for mine it just wasn't ideal so this is the reason that I have some dents in the side of my car and some scratch Chiz on top I think it's a great device check it out maybe try it on your car before you purchase it and it might work better for you than it did for me but it got the job done for a solid year so I start with a kayak at this 45-degree angle something you kind of have to play around with but one thing to keep in mind is you want the back of your kayak to be dead center in the middle of your car halfway from here to here so that when you slide it up on it the car it's going to be Center and can go on straight easy peasy so I'm a tiny bit out of breath I mean it's definitely work but if you have everything lined up you really you're never taking the entire weight of the kayak as you saw I kind of stopped a couple of times to make sure that it was still lining up with those tracks because once it starts shifting off to the side you're kind of screwed so I took a couple times but really it is a little bit of work but I think most people can probably do it as long as you're in decent shape so if you're trying it for the first time I recommend like have a spot both for your own safety and just you don't like take off a mirror of your car or something like that but I think that most people if you're well enough able enough to kayak fish you can probably get a kayak on top of your car using this device [Music] and that's it so if you know whoa so if you last notes on the load and unload as you can see when I tied it down I put a knot there's kind of a little loop knot in both these ropes and I gave them a little twist before I shut them in the door but not is so that it doesn't the Rope doesn't pull out of your car and kind of start hanging and the twist is so it actually helps with air resistance when you're going down the road so when you twist it and when you put the knot in you're not gonna hear much a vibration can be a good idea definitely if you're going like long distance or going on a freeway to do the front tie down or a back tie down too but I think mostly if you have a Kobe or a kayak with that football shape to the hull you really don't need it but it's always good to be safe if you want to right now I'm driving a grand total of about a mile so I'm definitely not gonna do it today what am I forgetting I think that's it all right guys and gals well that is the kayak load and unload in a nutshell so I hope that you found it beneficial and I hope that answered any questions that you had as I said at the beginning I wanted to fill you in on an adventure that I have coming up so long story short I'm going to a Europe tomorrow and before you ask it yes there will be a little bit of fishing while I'm over there some pretty funky species hopefully and fishing in a really cool different way so I'm excited for that I'm definitely gonna be filming while I'm over there is the timing ideal no it is not ideal at all of course I'm only about a week after I had this heart procedure but doctor was aware of it well in advance and that's part of why I had the procedure when I did so it would give me plenty of time to rest up before I go on this trip alright guys thanks again for watching the video make sure to give it a like if you enjoyed it and stay tuned for much more and I guess well I'll see you in Europe

Channel: Nattie Up North

Views: 683,299

Rating: 4.8253531 out of 5

Keywords: kayak fishing, fishing, fishing kayak, how to load a kayak, roofting a kayak, roof rack, getting a kayak on your car, transporting kayaks, hobie kayak, hobie mirage outback, 2019 hobie mirage outback, kayak fishing how to, how to kayak fish, yakima roof rack, yakima, hobie, garmin, garmin echomap, garmin livescope, kayak life

Id: UJ2gjvI8SOY

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2019