: Wow.
: Robert, You're a prominent paddler in my mind. I sincerely hope you have many
: pleasant, challenging and bear-free paddles! I enjoy reading your posts
: (along with a few other names I always look for), and if you want to carry
: a BFK on your PFD, more power to ya! I hope you never have to try it out
: on a bear. If I were ever stranded and had to hack together a camp or
: clean a fish, I'd probably be wanting your knife in exchange for the short
: blunt one I carry on my PFD.
Now that you mention it, I do remember using my knife to clear an area of willows so that I could pitch my tent for the night. I was paddling through an area of Saskatchewan that was so full of willows along the shoreline that I couldn't pitch my tent. I paddled for a half-hour before I finally stopped and used the knife to clear-cut the willows enough to pitch the tent. I couldn't have done this with a smaller knife. Sing's Khukuri would ahve been real handy then. My knife handled the job well since the blade is razor sharp. I hope I never encounter a bear except as I did last year, in the water and swimming defenselessly. Thanks for the compliments, I'll be certain to keep up my trip reporting, especially since I will be studying to be a writer in the new year.
: Luckily I don't have to worry much about bears around my parts although we do
: have some black bears and I *swear* I saw a Carolina panther cross the
: road through the Croatan forest last year, although they are extremely
: rare this far east. Most I'd have to worry about in a coastal camp would
: be racoons and bugs, *maybe* the odd pit viper. The greenhead flies out
: there are so lethal I think maybe one of the shotguns you guys talk about
: might be useful on them! You can slap them down and step on them and
: they'll get up and bite you again. The absolute worst is to be crossing a
: bay on a windless day and have flies following you. Even if you roll, they
: are still there when you come up. They don't seem to mind getting wet
: either. I've slapped them into the water and watched them get up and fly
: back around my head. I could probably bottle some of them up and ship them
: to you and you could release them in the general direction of any
: attacking bears! They'd be right hungry after making the trip to Edmonton!
Are you kidding me? You haven't met those mosquitos that followed Ken Sutherland and I across the bay at Lake WInnipeg last summer. I thought for certain that once we were over so much open water they'd disappear: nope! Those little buggers followed us all the way across. We killed as many as we could but they somehow kept appearing. Turned out that they were sitting on the decks waiting for their chance to get us. Canada is having a bush clearing sale on mosquitos, trained to harrass and annoy, just send cash and we'll send you your bugs. 
: To get back on topic, a ditch kit is something I am thinking about putting
: together myself, and your notes in the first post are helpful.
Glad the info was useful. My kit contents are actually the sum total of advice I was offered by the good folks here some two years ago - that's where the thanks should go. I'm just the messenger.
: I wanted to mention something that one of the instructors at a safety
: symposium last fall had, and I can't recall what the brand name or exactly
: what he called it. It was basically a big nylon bag, folded up very small,
: but you could unfold it and seat like up to seven people under it. We used
: it on a beach stop for lunch. Basically we all sat down in a circle, with
: each person sitting on the edge and leaning back into the
: "wall". We were wet and chilly in a ~20 mph wind, and getting
: under the shelter (basically like a tent with no support poles) was like
: instant tropics. It got very warm under there pretty quickly and the wind
: was cut off. The instructor said it could also be used at sea --you just
: spread it over all the paddlers in the raft up and roll it under deck
: bungies. Obviously you would choose the place and time for that on the
: water. The shelter had a "window" at each end which I could best
: describe as a "head tube"--basically a tunnel sewed into the
: shelter with a bit of elastic around the end of the sleeve so that it
: stayed fairly shut, but you could poke your head out, as we did on the
: beach to make sure the tide wasn't floating our boats away.
I'm going to see if this is for sale here, sounds like a great idea. I did just buy one of those reflective survival bags, for $7 they look like they'd be a life saver.
Robert N Pruden
*NM*
