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From: Malcolm956@aol.com
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 94 14:17:00 EDT
Subject: Re: Camping

I am afraid I overstated the crudeness of my camping when I said that I slept
in the dirt.  Sleeping on the ground, usually in a 1 or 2 person tent would
have been more like it.  I even favor the use of sleeping pads or air
mattresses though they are not a necessity unless the weather and ground are
cold.  Still, a fellow  camper once told me that the comforts of home are
best enjoyed at home.  He had a point.  

The trick to camping, as I see it, it to balance the rig against the given
conditions and your needs.  So over the years I have accumulated a lot of
different kinds of camping equipment.  

For base camp work I still favor my Coleman "Redwood" tent trailer and a very
large, self supporting dining fly.  The trailer is one of the smaller ones on
the market but pulls out for a double bed on one side and a single on the
other.  Left behind in the space the bunks vacated is a table with bench
seats, and a sink, propane stove and cabinets for eating & cleaning stuff.
 That trailer was a godsend for my family of five on a 9000 mile cross
country trip.  A small fly is used over the door to serve as a mud room and
porch.  The recent addition of a Sears porta pottie (required equipment for
sailboat camping trips) makes the middle of the night quite civilized.  

The dining fly is my oldest piece of equipment.  It is a 12'x20' bright
yellow cotton canvas tarp that a Boy Scout troop declared surplus over 30
years ago.  Cotton is nice because it is far more resistant than nylon to
fireplace sparks.  The ridge runs the 12' dimension and is supported by 8'
adjustable poles.  The corners are at 6'.  A standard picnic table will fit
under one half of the fly, leaving the other half free for play pens, lounge
chairs, etc.  My wife and I can set it up in about 10 minutes.  If you set it
up carefully, it is quite wind resistant.  Once I kept the fly up through the
remnants of a hurricane at Fundy National Park, when even a mountain tent at
a nearby campsite went down.  One side was pegged to the ground, the center
poles shortened to less than six feet and the other end was less than four.
 Not much room for me, but it kept the kids out of the downpours.  

Of late I have done more camping by myself, first by bicycle and now in my
dory.  Here the rigs are minimal to marginal.  While it is reasonable to
drive the Land Rover ten miles out of the way just to hit a campground, it
doesn't work on a bike.  Often you need to do some very low profile camping.
 Fortunately in New England we have no beasties more venomous than mosquitoes
and blackflies, so for this work I use a 10'x10' fly and mosquito netting.
 The home made fly is camouflage nylon, bias cut, so that it is very stable,
like the commercial Parafly.

My knees are  not responding too well to bicycling these days so I am doing
more sail camping along the coast of Maine.  Here the Land Rover has pulled
more than one exotic car or truck from a steep, slippery boat launch ramp.
 Twice a day tidal wetting of a boat ramp and the blue-green algae that live
in the intertidal redefine the concept of slippery.  

The dory is an open boat with thwarts that run crossways.  I cut plywood
sheets to bolt to the thwarts for a deck and sleeping platform with storage
under for waterproof canoe bags.  I swing the sprit pole horizontally from
the mast with the halyard at after end and the snotter at the forward.  A
custom fitted brown poly tarp is draped over the pole, snapped to the gun'nls
and, bingo, I have a tent.  The part that covers the cockpit can be folded
back for fair weather.   It is just like camping in a tent with a patio.  I
prefer to anchor off shore and sleep aboard, but often the thing to do is to
camp on an island.  A light weight rig is useful to minimize trips lugging
stuff ashore.  

The combination of Land Rover and Swampscott dory really attracts attention.
 But you get some weird looks in mainland campgrounds when you drive in, step
the mast, rig a tarp and sleep in the boat on the trailer.  

Some kind of fly, whether an awning from the side of the vehicle, a large
self standing fly, a 10'x10' nylon tarp between trees, a tarp stretched over
a pvc frame or a cover over the cockpit of the boat can make or break a
camping trip.  In other than perfect weather, a fly might be the most
important piece of camping equipment.

Dave VE4PN's extruded aluminum track can be thought of this way:  the cross
section is like the letter 'p', but with the right side cut away like the
letter 'c'.  It should be as many feet long as the tarp you are using.  Rivet
the stem of the 'p' to something solid.  Fold, or sew, a tarp over a piece of
rope and feed it in through the open end of the 'c'.  The rope must be big
enough to not pull out through the slot but small enough to slide in endwise.
 This system is commonly used on small sailboats to secure the sail to the
mast using a bolt rope.
  
The bottom line of all this blathering is that I enjoy camping, heavy or
light.  I don't enjoy an overstuffed car, so for heavy camping I prefer to
tow my home and goods behind me and leave the car freed up for automotive
use.  For light camping, I like to have it all fit in one pack basket and not
clutter up the car.  

As to age.  At 61 I have trouble thinking of someone at 48 as an old lady.
 Rather, I would say, approaching prime and about to catch her second wind.
 It is never too late to have a happy childhood.  That is what Land Rovers
are all about.

Malcolm

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