Red Rock’s Trapeze Method for Canoe Hanging
Here’s a simple way to hand your canoe. Don’t let the fat ropes and heavy cross pieces fool you. If you are hanging a Souris River Canoe, all you need is a couple of 1″ dowl rods (or some 2 X 2’s, or even some fairly straight sticks from the back yard) cut to 24″ to 30″ or so. The rope I recommend is 5/16″ braided nylon rope because it’s nice to work with but feel free to use variations on the theme (other rope). Without too much typed explanation, look at the following pictures and do this in your garage, barn, basement, etc. The only thing you need to make sure of is that if you are putting in some screw-in eyebolts in your ceiling, you MUST be screwing them into ceiling joists and not just the sheet rock or even thin paneling. If you don’t have sheet rock, you can just tie the rope around the ceiling joists and hang them down to your “trapeze” cross pieces. Plan on about 30 minutes or less of adjusting the ropes to get the right height that you require. Also, make sure you allow for your garage door opening as it rolls up to the ceiling. Wouldn’t that be something – you walk your shiny new canoe through the side door of your garage, get it all hung up on this nice open section of the ceiling and your wife, returning from an errand, pulls in the driveway and hits the garage opener in her car. OK, so it’s probably implausible, but I’ve seen (and done) my share of goofs in other areas.
Remember, this is only one way to skin a canoe. Feel free to develop your own ideas and methods. Good Luck!
Here’s Bob Cary, the author of Root Beer Lady, Ely Echoes, Bush Pilots, Tales from Jackpine Bob, and a bunch of other great books, poking the nose of his canoe into the first “trapeze”.
(He was actually portaging the canoe somewhere – ahh, the wonders of Photoshop!)
Once, you have the nose in place, carefully set the tail on the floor behind you and walk out from under the canoe. Before you let go completely, make sure it’s not sliding away or off the first trapeze. Why beat up a nice canoe?
One other Canoe Hangin’ Way: You can also hang the canoe right side up by the grab handles with no problems either, although you may not be able to get it as close to the ceiling. NOTE: If you have a leaky garage roof, do not hang the canoe right-side-up! We once leased a storefront in Ely (piece of crap building!!!) with a leaky roof in the back where the canoes were kept. Due to the cumbersome size of big, fat Old Town’s, we had to place them on one particular rack, right side up. The ceiling leaked over the weekend, and we ended up with 4″ of water in a canoe which was on the top rack and weighed 83 lbs. to begin with. I didn’t know it had water in it and went up a ladder to take it down. That almost got really ugly for me. Fortunately I caught on and bailed it out. So, no leaky roof – no problemo.
