My Yukon race team has gone to using 2" wide Velcro to hold spray covers on our Yukon race canoes
Velcro has proven to work well for us, debris has not been a problem on the hook or the loop side.
I am curious about why our satisfaction with Velcro for spray cover attachment was so different. Mine was a DIY cover I made for a solo canoe in the early 1990s. Some possible explanations.
Mine was not constructed with industrial strength Velcro, just standard strength stuff I could find at the time, and was on the canoe I used most often, for everything, all the time.
I used that cover on almost every trip, which certainly did not help with pollen laden water, spider silk and fall leaf debris splashed up betwixt the Velcro edges.
Mostly I suspect the long term failure was due to storing that canoe on an outside rack.
Thinking that the hook part was the likelier to catch woodsy debris while on the rack, I glued the less attractive loop side of the Velcro to the hull. Even that loop side got visibly gunked up in outside storage, and required occasional cleaning out with a small brush. It also suffered over time from UV degradation on the rack as the teeny loops fell apart.
But even the hook part on the cover fabric mysteriously picked up its share of gunk over time as well, despite being stored in a box in the gear room when not adhered. The hooks pulled off their share of outside storage gunk from the loops every time I removed the cover. After a few years neither piece was pretty, or even very Velcro black.
That cover adhered great for a couple years, then less well for a couple years, and then I replaced the worn and dirty Velcro loop strips on the hull and got a few more years out of it.
Questions. For anyone considering a DIY spray cover, what is a good quality Velcro to use? Ordered from where? And how did you adhere the Velcro to the outside of the hull?
Mike mine does not sag.. I do treat with a durable water repellent. . Fruitless argument.
Time to go paddlng
Kim, no argument intended, just materials clarification for anyone pondering covers. My CCS covers do alternate between drum tight and puddle soggy, depending on rain or even excessively high humidity. That does not much bother me, I just lift the edge of the cover and dump the puddle if need be.
Being encased in a tunnel skirt may help raise and alleviate some of the potential cover sag.
If the water is pooling on the excess skirt material I have no clue.I am not a skirt wearer. Cargo pocketed kilt in the McCrea tartan maybe, but no skirts.
Aside from leaning an eddy turn I am not attempting a mid river wedge simply to dump water a pint of water. Nor an axle, post, christie or other watch me fall over maneuver.
And no diss intended to Cooke Custom Sewing. CCS nylon and snap rivets would still be my first choice among manufactured covers.
The urethane coated nylon packcloth Cooke uses has advantages with fixed snap rivet installation. If I have a gear load protruding slightly above the gunwale in spots the wetted out stretchy nylon still snaps on easily enough. When it dries taut I believe I could read heads or tails atop a quarter placed under the cover. I have hap hazardously loaded the bow with some errant object sticking pointy side up, and been concerned about the stress of that oops mini circus tent protrusion when the rest of the nylon cover went drum tight across it.
Northwater uses 1000 denier PVC coated polyester. There is not a lot of wet out stretch with that material, so the hooks attached to the through hull loops are height adjustable. The Northwater covers also come with a heavy duty 3 inch rub strip material on and below the gunwale edges.
FWIW, and if it matters, Northwater covers are heavier duty, and heavier. I have a full sized PVC coated tandem cover, not a Northwater but of similar material, with nylon tunnels but no rub strips. And a same hull size Cooke Custom Sewing nylon cover, 3 pieces, long bow and stern partials with raised drainage baffles and with a center storage section for camp use, no skirt. And a small weight scale in the shop. What the hell. . . . .
PVC coated cover, 5 lbs 12 oz
CCS nylon cover, 3 lbs, 2 oz
That was an interesting exercise. I had never really compared the two spray cover stuff bags side by side, much less weighed them. Much less considered the largely unimportant to me storage volume difference.
The PVC coated cover just fits inside a sleeping bag stuff sack, think synthetic fill 3 season bag. The Cooke Custom Sewing cover fits in a stuff bag the size of a shoebox, provided you wear size 12s. The CCS nylon cover is half the volume, and almost half the weight. If and when that matters.
Kim, about the arched stay. The CCS partial covers on the soloized Penobscot have a single arched stay under the bow cover section, a 3 piece ferruled and shock corded length of thin glass tent poles, 57 inches long.
It runs along parallel centered over the keel line, from deck plate to front thwart, with a couple inches of rise when bowed into place. It is easy, simple, and works best when cover is saggy damp to lift up a no puddle vee. When the nylon is taut dry that long slender bow stay just pushes over to one side and the cover is essentially taut flat.
Yeah, time to go paddling. I have two trips coming up. One in either SW or NW Pennsylvania, no road trip difference to me. One in NW New Jersey the following weekend. No sense coming home for a few days, I may just stay out that way for the time between.
Luckily I can finagle either route to include a stop at Blue Mountain Outfitters along the way. It has been a while between visits, and I have been keeping a parts needed list.
