ONE IMPORTANT PRE-CURSOR IN THIS MESSAGE – FOR ENVIRONMENTAL & LOGISTICAL REASONS, WE ARE NOW CLOSED TO ANY ADDITIONAL PARTICIPANTS… WE HAVE 26 AND THAT IS ALSO THE UPPER END OF THE PROSPECTIVE SITE’S CAPACITY! (btw, I also want to thank people for getting me their bios and photos, and the latest edition of the participant list is above – if you’re missing, please send that to me as soon as you can.) Like I touched on before, there is no source of fresh water on the island where we will be camping – we MUST bring in our own water at a conservative estimate of 2-liters per person, per day. The best way to transport water is by using the large, 2-liter soda pop bottles – please make sure that each person starts collecting three of them today. (Days 1 and 5, we will be back on Vancouver Island where we have fresh water) As far as food is concerned, everyone will be responsible to bring their own, and be prepared to cook your own meals on a gas stove that you will need to supply as well. There are plenty of inexpensive cooking stoves out there; one very inexpensive source are Big 5 Sports stores or Canadian Tires, where you can get a canned butane stove (big5sportinggoods/product/stoves-grills/478242-149459/camp-chef-8-000-btu-one-burner-butane-stove.html) or (reviews.canadiantire.ca/9045/0762771P/no-world-famous-butane-stove-with-case-reviews/reviews.htm) – along with three canisters of fuel per 2-3 people for the days on the island. The site we are on has been used by tribal fisher-people for centuries, so there is a shortage of anything BUT driftwood – and that stuff is not easy to cut up! We may find enough driftwood for a fire evenings, but don’t count on using it for cooking – you WILL need to use a stove. We should bring a couple of tarps as well to rig a roof over the kitchen (see pic below) – that makes it a bit easier if it rains too. Please note that we will have vegans and non-vegans mixed on the trip, and I hope that everyone will respect each other’s choices about food. Please make sure you also each have plates and cutlery and a cup, preferably Lexan, for your own meals. I would like to ask that you also prepare a small ziplock bag with a pot scrubber and biodegradable dish soap (Dr. Bronners Peppermint Castile Soap is one option), and you can use it for body and skin too. BTW, the Kwakiutl tribal guardians who roam these ancestral islands by boat to maintain cultural awareness and control pollution have built some crude cooking tables (picture below) and a box privy a short walk away from the camping area (DO NOT FORGET to bring your own supply of toilet paper for three days – white, unbleached, for the box privy). BTW, not need for your own animal canisters - we are also going to have access to a large steel storage box onsite, so we can keep our food inside that to keep mice and squirrels away. Nola and I traditionally prepare our dinner meals like this: we spend one evening making a large pot of pasta, and put in all kinds of things like mushrooms, peppers, onions, cashews, etc. (you can also add pieces of cut up meat in this method if you wish), then we boil/cook it and put them into individual seal-a-meal bags, doubled up in zip-lock bags, and then we put them into the freezer to freeze solid. You can also do the same with breakfasts; either mix up scrambled eggs or grains, add peppers, fruit pieces, onions, nuts, raisins, dried cranberries, etc., and bag and freeze them in separate serving portions as well. For lunches, we often take bagels or flatbread, fruits, and add either a sealed container of hummus, cream cheese, or peanut/almond butters, etc. The plan with hot meals is to put the separate servings of meals into hot water and prepare our dinners and breakfasts that way, and eat cold meals for lunch. You can always have plenty of other foods and snacks along (cheese, cut-up veggies, crackers, oatmeal, soups, teas, etc.) and package things into your ‘kayak-top’ bag as well during the crossing. We usually bring along a 3 or 4 liter box of wine – minus the box (the bags they are in are pretty robust) and have that sit inside the hull of our kayak. Feel free to bring beer, wine, spirits (particularly ABSINTHE!) as long as you think the bottles will stay intact. Keep in mind, we pack out ALL of our garbage too Sometimes we all pitch in a little of our food on the last evening (Sunday night) and create a kind of ‘pot luck’ dinner for people to share something special – in past years, our boys have even paddled out to a fishing boat and bartered for a large salmon fillet, or harvested mussels from the rocks at low tide, and simmered them in white wine and garlic for an hour or so (the smell and waiting was torture!), as a special perk – Tarah and Ryan have also brought some interesting fruit to share – this is a great time to show you camp cooking skills, if you wish! BTW, if anyone has any recipes that they want to share, please feel free to do so. The important single takeaway here is that everyone (or pairs, or families, etc.) are responsible for preparing and packing their own meals – remember, always bring enough for 4 days (vice three days) JUST incase we are stormbound for an extra day or so. Safety gear – I will be bringing along three marine band VHF radios, two ‘SPOT’ (EPIRB) type satellite rescue transmitters (in case of emergency injuries and need for rescue), and a hand-held GPS to track our cadence and water speed before the crossings. Occasionally, I will radio the Canadian Coast Guard and let them know that “a group of 10 kayaks are crossing the Strait at…” to make sure that they are aware of our path – and to let the occasional oncoming cruise ships know we are in the Strait. (Yup, we will see a couple of huge, obnoxious cruise liners pass or island, sigh! – But we sometimes line up on shore, face them, and do a group ‘mooning’ as they pass by, so that the high-end tourists get a chance to see our ‘opinions’ of their route selection). I also carry flares (each rental kayak usually includes three flares per kayak too), and I carry a green, high-power laser to use as a signal device – this is a new method of signaling that has yet to be ‘discovered’ by many outdoors enthusiasts, but I swear by these devices (they can even reach the cockpits of aircraft in the case of dire emergencies in the wilderness). BTW, please make sure that each couple carries a small first aid kit for each kayak! BTW, in the next message, I am going to send out a select YouTube link (when I find one that meets my standards ) on how to do a assisted rescue in a sea kayak – this will be a very important video that I will ask everyone attending the trip to view at least once, so that they know how to handle things if someone goes into the water… ONE IMPORTANT ITEM – THE ‘WATER TAXI’ One important thing I need to mention is a contingency for the last day – just in case gale-strength weather conditions require an emergency extraction from Hanson’s Island. In the last 7 years we have done this trip, there was only one time we needed to radio in a water taxi. A water taxi is an aluminum-hulled vessel that has a rack built on it to hold kayaks. In the event that the weather gets too stormy for a crossing (and I monitor the marine weather on my VHF radios continually) and people are not confident of return crossing on Monday, we have the option of radioing in a water taxi from Port McNeil to pick us up – the cost it pretty high (about $1200 per trip), and we would need to split the cost for the people using this contingency. I DO NOT expect us to need this service, but just in case, please make sure that a few of us have credit cards that, in the event we need to use this option, we can make it happen. Until the next message – feel free to email around questions, thoughts, comments, input, etc. as well to the people on this list.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 03:49:04 +0000
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