I sat down once and tried to account for all the nights I'd spent camping in the outdoors. I tried to think of all the vacations spent for twenty+ years backpacking in the Appalachians. All the week long fishing trips as a kid spent camping on the Ohio river. The twenty five or thirty years we camped for at least a week a year in the woods bow hunting. The month spent backpacking the continental divide. And the countless nights spent one or two at a time along the river. The best estimate I could come up with is that I've spent a couple years out of my life camping.
The last few years I've taken three or four long weekend type fishing trips along either the Little or Great Miami each summer out of my kayak. Kayak camping is a lot like the backpacking I used to do so much of along trout streams in the mountains. In both there is a limit to just how much you can carry, either on your back or in the yak.
Probably the handiest gadget you can bring along to save weight is a water filter. I've had a bunch of these over the years and I've learned a few things. The best in the long run are the ones that have the ceramic filters. It might be cheaper initially to buy one with a paper filter but then you have to buy the filters and find them. Like fishing reels, water filter models seem to change every couple years and after a while finding the right filter was always a pain. And trust me you need to filter the water. Years ago my wife and I spent some time backpacking Rocky Mountain National Park which is overrun with elk. And even with a filter we both ended up catching giardia or some other protozoan parasite and spent half the summer cramping and going potty five times a day. Like I said filter the water.
I'm a huge fan of the little isobutane backpacking stoves to cook with. They boil water very fast and you can adjust them down to a low simmer. One of the little canisters is all I need for a three or four day trip. I do though cook on the campfire also which saves fuel. You can tell a difference in their performance in really cold weather but they do still work. I know because we started out one morning in fifty degree weather along a trout stream in the smokies when it started to rain lightly. By the time we got to our backcountry camping spot that night up on the mountaintop there was a near blizzard going on. But the little stove cooked supper and breakfast as well as thawed out the half inch of ice covering the rope used to hoist our food up a tree. It was a little too wild lying in the tent that night hearing trees fall all around us because of the ice.
I like to eat a meal or two of fish while camped along the stream. I carry some heavy duty aluminum foil and a zip lock baggie of seasoning. Then I usually bake the fish wrapped in foil on a flat rock nestled in a bed of the hottest coals I can rake around it with a stick. But you can't eat fish all the time. The handiest, lightest way to eat well is dehydrated food. Lots of dehydrated food is sold in places like Bass Pro in the camping section. But there is a way to eat better and way cheaper at the same time. What you do is repackage the little "add boiling water" cups you can buy in the grocery store. I'm not talking ramen noodles here.
If you go to Jungle Jims they have scattered throughout the store a wide variety of these dehydrated foods. Potato soup, chili, black bean soup, I'm guessing at least a dozen different kinds. And some of it is very good, as good as canned chili and soups. Kroger has a few of these but not nearly what Jungle Jims has. If your going on a longer trip the best thing to do is to repackage it all into ziplock bags. No bulky packaging and it's rainproof also. I usually take instant oatmeal for breakfast. Like the dehydrated food, it's light, filling, and fast to prepare. I carry a decent sized pocket knife and one of those spork things made out of unbreakable plastic.
I make my own firestarters. Buy cotton balls and Vaseline. Get a handful of cotton balls and smear Vaseline all over them. Then begin pulling them apart, shredding the cotton balls and mixing the Vaseline in. By the time you have it pulled apart into one big fluffy clump the Vaseline will be mixed all through the cotton ball. Stuff this along with two lighters into a ziplock bag. Pull out a little at a time, the equivalent of what was once two or three cotton balls will start a fire. Just start with small stuff and add slightly bigger sticks of wood till you have a fire. If you use small matchstick sized stuff at first you can even start a fire in the rain with cotton balls and Vaseline. And it weighs nearly nothing and squishes down to nearly nothing too. Just rip it apart and fluff it up again if its too compacted.
If I'm in the yak or hiking back in I only bring one pot. A small aluminum one with a sturdy wire bail. Like I said earlier I'm cooking things that only require boiling water so I don't need any thing fancier which would be heavier. Don't get me wrong, I love cooking with the Dutch oven and we make everything from roasts to cake in them. But that's campground or deer camp cooking. If I'm going to be in the same spot for more than a day I enjoy making all kinds of things to cook with. I'll cut forked sticks and a cross bar. Then find just the right half inch thru little tree that I can cut to maybe ten inches long and trim down the little side branches down to a couple inches each so that it hangs off the cross bar and the pot hangs off one of the stubs carved from the branches.
After all these years we have accumulated four or five tents. Everything from a great big one larger than my living room down to a little solo one that fits nicely into my kayak. The little solo one can be a bit claustrophobic though. If your going to take a tent I'd suggest the smallest two person backpacking tent you can find. But if it's summer I'm more likely to take a tarp and some nylon rope. With a good spool of nylon rope, along with the bungee cords I use to lash things onto the yak, I can rig up a pretty cool shelter. Everything from lean-to shapes to tent like shapes, with a bit of imagination you can rig one up pretty much anywhere. And have a lot more room to get in out of the rain than you would in a tent.
Oh one more thing. Those zip off legs, quick dry backpacking pants are the best thing ever made for wading, camping and kayaking along a river. They dry in minutes by the fire so you can get them soaked wading and still sleep dry and cozy. Don't wear shorts unless they are these pants with the legs zipped off. Just wearing shorts guarantees you will get in the middle of an endless patch of stinging nettles, have to take a dump in the middle of ten acres of poison ivy or that the mosquitos will be bad. Get the pants, you will never go wading without them again.
So there you have it, that's how I go about it. How do you go about camping along the river?
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