Foam, straps, and a reason to leave early.

A Riverside kit is a few pieces that do one job well. Dense foam blocks sit on your roof or slide onto your crossbars and cradle the hull. Cam straps run over the boat and through the car. Bow and stern lines keep it pointed straight at highway speed. No rack is required, no tools are needed, and the whole kit stows in the trunk when you’re done.

That simplicity is the point. A lot of people who paddle don’t own a roof rack, and a lot of people who own a kayak only need to move it a few times a summer. Riverside lets them do it with the car they already have.

Riverside began on the other side of the country, as Riverside Cartop Carriers of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. New England is canoe country, full of lakes, rivers and cars with no roof racks, and Riverside made exactly what that called for: foam-block carrier kits with straps, rope and bumper hooks for canoes and kayaks.

Seattle Sports, the Pacific Northwest gear maker that started in 1983 welding dry bags for paddlers, brought Riverside west. By 2000 it had filed the Riverside name for its cartop canoe and kayak carrier kits, and the blocks have been riding on car roofs coast to coast ever since.

“A 6x3x3″ standard block that’s been supporting our canoe for decades.”byebyelabs, verified buyer, buying a replacement pair

That review is our favorite kind. It means a kit outlasted the car it was bought for. It’s also why we sell replacement blocks one at a time and in pairs: when one wears out or blows off at a boat launch, you replace the block, not the kit.

Riverside customers carry everything. A 70-pound pirogue from Louisiana to Georgia. A big aluminum canoe on five-hour drives to the Adirondacks. A 12-foot and a 9-foot-4 paddleboard stacked on one car at 65 miles an hour. A Mad River canoe with odd gunwales that the blocks held anyway.

“I was nervous but the boards were tied down rock solid and didn’t move an inch.”filthy, verified buyer, SUP Carrier Kit

We read every review, including the critical ones, and we leave them all up. Wider blocks for wide hulls, taller blocks for deep canoes, and the StrapSto™ reel for the tangle of cam straps in the trunk are all there for the same reason.

Riverside is run out of Portland, Oregon, now, and every order ships from here. It’s a good town for it. The Willamette runs through the middle of the city, the Columbia is fifteen minutes away, and the coast and the Cascade lakes are an easy morning’s drive with a boat on the roof.

Every summer brings new paddlers, and most of them start the same way: a new boat, a car with no rack, and a parking lot at the put-in. We want Riverside to be how they get there, and how they’re still getting there in twenty years.