Yes, the hot water bottle is a good old trick. Actually, anytime I’m camping where I think it might get cold at night I keep a qt (at least) water bottle in the sleeping bag with me - and I don’t own a sleeping bag that isn’t rated to at least 20 deg. (though, alas, I must admit I have had some that got old and used enough that they didn’t live up to their ratings). I usually carry my own water in jugs, (because I can carry it in a canoe - backpacking would be different) but its nice to have a bottle of guaranteed liquid water to make coffee/oatmeal with in the morning while the fire is thawing the main water jug. BTW, putting a garbage bag over the foot of your sleeping bag buys you a few extra degrees of warmth, too. A mylar emergency one is even better and also packs small and light.
Because I sandbar camp a lot and there often isn’t something secure to tie to, I have to pass on the trick used by that guy who’s boat (the only one of four) didn’t blow in the wind storm I described previously. Looks like this:
And BTW, do you western paddlers encounter winds like this often? 0 to ~60mph in under five minutes on a clear night shortly after dusk, lasting about a half hour to calm again, is unheard of around here or anywhere else I’ve visited. What’s up with that? Is it a canyonlands/desert or higher altitude thing? Furthermore, folks we met coming off the river at the landing and who camped a little way upstream didn’t experience any wind at all, so it was very localized. What would cause that? Is it in any way predictable?
I also carry two compasses (though maybe a third, as mentioned, wouldn’t hurt), a map if it seems possible it might be useful, and no GPS. On the subject of GPSs, which I know are used by almost everyone now and which I readily admit have their place on longer more elaborate trips…
I have to chuckle and share an incident that once happened on one of my Wisconsin River Pnet trips. We stopped for lunch on an island. I knew where we were and how far to our next campsite, etc. having done the route many times, but if folks with a GPS are eating lunch the GPSs have to be examined if only to pass the time and determine exactly how fast we’re traveling. There were three GPSs in our group and none agreed with the others. One even had us located in a small town that was nearby - we could hear it, but we were very definitely on a sand beach on an island in the river. Not in town. John McPhee in one of his books (“Looking for a Ship” if I recall correctly) notes that if you have a GPS on board a boat you always know exactly where you are. If you have two, you have the makings of a good discussion. He has a point, I think.
I’m disappointed you didn’t name your water bottles.
The local police chief back in the 90s had me try to teach him how to use their new Magellan GPS. Todays GPS is a different beast. I carry a pocket sized Garman Etrex 20x with coastal marine charts, and topo maps for those states I need. It uses both US and Russian satellites for location. The more Satellites it can acquire the better accuracy. However, governments can intentionally degraded the signals, say like when the President is traveling through an area etc. It’s hard to have a degraded map and compass though.
I have a small camera drone that has GPS, and it acquires it’s home point before take off. It regularly acquires 20 or more satellites. It can be flown 3 miles out. If you should lose radio connection, or you just want it to fly back by itself (then hit return to home) and it comes back to land within a few feet of where it took off.
For the past five years (with the exception of covid 2020) I have taught a two day practical land navigation course for New York State Homeland Security, to law enfocement, EMS, Fire, and SAR. At first the syllabus was billed to included GPS training, but after the first few classes we had to drop that training segment. Everyone with their own GPS would come to me and th other instructors, asking “how do I… with this unit?”, a question directed to their own particular model of GPS. Even though each should give the same result in the end, everyone of them is different with its own whole set of function windows to click through. Some even with various navigation apps on their different model smart phones made the task truly impossible. Instructors could simply not take the time to become familiar with every different individual GPS model, taking way too much time from the important basics of land navigation that most of those student users really needed to learn first.
I have seen high winds pop up in minutes on the Green. Whether or not they are 60 mph they can uproot or flatten tents. I was inside the tent which was a Trango 3.1 a Mountain Hardwear tent designed for Base camp on Everest and it leaned! But one of those winds took a tent and hurled it into the Green where along with its contents it ran Cataract Canyon. Its owner was up on the Doll House 1500 feet up and watched it float away.
My pitch is that the GPS is good for small spaces like finding that hiding behind mangroves in Whitewater Bay in the Everglades and just about useless for the big picture. And weather radio… I do have a marine radio and it often gets nothing or nothing pertinent. Its annoying to listen to the forecast for Whitefish Bay in MI when you are near Marathon ON some 200 miles away. So I have learned to read the sky and correlate that with shifts in winds. Mare’s tails are usually accurate.
Kyacmedic:
We had a similar experience on the Green. We were camped on a sand bar and a storm came up just as we were getting ready to cook dinner. Tents were blown flat and making dinner, in the blowing sand, was nearly impossible.
Been there . That is why I carry the weather radio. It monitors the NWS channels and gets the alerts. You do not need it in the daytime if you have an eye on the sky, but not finding out a storm is coming at night until the wind starts blowing, is no fun and often times a storm many miles up river may impact your riverside camp.
We were on the Buffalo a few years ago between Woolum and Bakers and a big storm hit above Ponca at about 10pm. All we heard was a little rumbling in the distance and 3 hours later our sandy beach was under a foot of water and rising. If I had not received the T Storm and Flash flood alert and had everyone move back behind the tree line, we would have had a bad night.
Weather radio stations are short range and send the NWS alerts. Some can also be programmed to only react to select county codes. That eliminates all the out of area info. We have one in our house since we live in Tornado alley and it only goes off for the codes in our area.
Weather radio has no stations in Northern Ontario inland and few on the Superior Ontario coast. Environment matters. Weather radio or marine radio is fine in my locality… But just because you have it locally it is a huge mistake to assume it will be functional where you intend to travel
if you look at this list there is a weather station in Hattie Cove. You can hear it in Hattie Cove Its 112 watts… Probably due to topography it is not audible 15 miles away. And it is a long way to the next low watt station in Montreal River… almost 100 miles. https://www.qsl.net/ve7hce/weatherradio.htm
If you know the wattage of the weather radio in the area you are going to be paddling in , that gives you a general idea of what you can hear. Or not. Topography matters so canyons are a problem
Weather Radio in the US is operated by NOAA and NWS and is nationwide. I can’t believe that Canada does not have it. That is a shame. It is very handy. Been using it since I was a kid. The dad of one of the kids I went to school with was the occasional voice of the then pre-recorded messaging, now it is a computer generated voice. The later addition of alerts is part of the early warning system. The timeliness on weather radio beats broadcast radio by a lot and is about the same as Accuweather or Weather Channel on a cell phone (if you have reception) and there are not too many places that I have found where it does not work.
Go back and read again. I did not say that Canada does not have weather radio. Did you look at the charts???
Canada has it where there are the most people that can benefit from it. The station in Yukon in Whitehorse is only audible for 100 miles. I have canoed some thousand miles north of it and still in the Yukon.
That there is an Enviromnent Canada station in Kenora. That is absolutely worthless when you go to Red Lake some 180 miles away. There is a whole lot pf paddle country not covered.
Never bothered to haul a weather radio along on the Missinaibi. Didn’t expect to pick up anything up there. We were able to go on-line at Hearst before we launched the last trip on the Lower & knew that a front was coming in a few days. We were camped on a bit of a sandbar at the end of the Stone Rapids portage & didn’t need a weathermen to tell us that the wind was about to blow. When it hit, it hit hard & we spent a while hanging on to two tents (mine included) pitched in the softest sand until a couple of people could go looking for bigger rocks for anchors.
We did pick up Hattie Cove from the mouth of the White on the radio. Let us know that the wind would stay calm for a few hours even though the swell left over from the previous day was running 2’ - 3’.
Reminds me of last Saturday out on Richland Chambers Reservoir.
Rewind to this last spring/summer, we had two accidents on the news where someone got swept over the floodgates at Lake Overholser. I’ve been on that lake at times when I felt it didn’t want me out there.
My friend Jerry said if it’s whitecapping, you don’t go on it. Back to Saturday, my brother in law Bruce got back on his boat and headed a little closer to the floodgates to do some wakeboarding. The reservoir was calm but the wind was slowly picking up. I stayed behind in my kayak just relaxing and paddling slowly in the direction Bruce had gone.
Next thing I know I got rocked by a pretty decent set of waves. I thought it was a wake from one of the other boats, so I turned into it, rode it out, and went about chilling some more. Thirty minutes later this had turned to constant 12 to 18 inch swells. Concerned that I would lose my UHF radio in a capsize, I decided to head for shore. I picked up my FRS radio and let the family know I was headed back.
Bruce climbed back aboard his boat and looked in my direction only to see nothing but whitecaps. My wife and sister in law were on the boat with him; he turned the boat around and my wife established contact with me via Family Radio Service. They said sit tight, they’d come pick me up. I paddled towards the shore for a few minutes, finally letting up as Bruce pulled alongside me. We pulled the kayak in, set it up on the bank, and took the big boat back out for a while.
Lessons learned: always stay in touch with, and in sight of your group, stay off the lake when it’s whitecapping, and wear your life jacket!! (I did, and I have tried floating without one in those swells, it’s very tiring!)
Situation #2, last January. I was stalking white tail deer at Thunderbird State Park when I realized I was completely lost in the woods. It went dark, making the situation worse, though I had plenty of light with me. With limited cell signal Google Earth wouldn’t work. I had a ham radio and was well within range of a repeater but had no autopatch cable.
But I had this. The fire break I had hiked in on was just beyond those trees. Had to be. The compass said I was facing northwest, so I was almost there. If I could just get through the dense brush and briars…
Nope. I could go no further for the cedar trees. They were so dense the branches we’re about an inch apart and there was no sign of the fire break. I stopped to think and to find my discharge bolt that I’d heard fall from the crossbow.
In the distance a twig snapped. Great, I was going to come home with a deer! Nope. I looked and roughly 100 feet away was a set of small green eyes close to the ground. Stuff just got real. The crossbow went one way and my 9mm came out. I had no idea what was approaching or if I could score a defensive hit on it. There was no room to run the crossbow either.
The creature moved on. I called 911 and they picked up the GPS from my phone. They guided me back to the fire break and I hiked two miles back to my truck. A Game Warden had pulled up and waited for me to make it back. He made sure I was warm while he checked my ID and hunting license.
Lessons learned: carry a phone and a radio and the stuff to use them. Autopatch could have gotten word out before I picked up cell signal. Let someone know where you are and when to expect you back. I had done so and when I didn’t check back in with my wife she also called 911. Carry a map and a good knife. I carried neither and got lost due to not having a map and had to do my best to whack away sharply thorned vines with my crossbow. Last lesson: mark your route. I didn’t and that’s why I got lost to begin with.
