Hi, all. I'm back from my last 4 day, 3 night trip. Beforehand, I had asked for advice on sleeping pads, cleaning wine sacks, and bear bags. Thought I'd share some results. For the pad, I went with the Thermarest Base Camp. It's not part of the LE line, but it was reasonable comfortable, reasonably sized, and resonably inexpensive after the sale price. I think I'll be happy with it for quite a long time. For the box-o-wine wine sack oder, I received numerous good suggestions on how to get the wine oder out. One was to use Chlorox, and since I already had some of that in the house, I gave it a shot. It worked great, for about 3 days, then the smell returned, so I gave it another washing before starting the trip. Seems to have worked fine. And, from previous discussions, we already knew that the bags themselves work good for water carriers. It was suggested to use the 2.5 liter rather than 5 liter bags... I agree totally. The 5 liter bags are too awkward and heavy (comparatively). It was also suggested to make a nylon bag with handles to carry it in. Size the bag slightly smaller than the wine sack to keep pressure off of the wine sack seems. Again, I totally agree. Carrying the wine sack is like carrying a bowl of jello without the bowl. Regarding bear bags, I went cheap. I skipped the canisters and Ursacks (sp?). I used two pre-existing day packs. The area I was in is low on Black Bear (no Brown at all), so the main concern was pesky critters like Raccoons. The tough part was locating trees suitable for hanging the bags. The branches were either too high, too low, too angled, too thin and weak, or the tree itself was inaccessible due to the quantity of briars and undergrowth. Anyway, thanks for all the advice. By the way, the 4 days and 3 nights ended up being 1-1/2 days and 1 night. We had an "incident" on one of the sets of riffles (river trip, using a canoe), after which my brother (his first canoe/camping trip) decided that it was time to go home, so I took him home. In general, we got the boat pinned against a set of rocks, broadside to the water flow, and 3/4 under water after about 20 seconds of water rushing into the canoe. It took us 2-1/2 hours to recover. It would have been hopeless if the water were deeper or faster, so I suppose we got lucky in more ways than one. That was enough excitement for my brother, though. But, he's willing to try again in the Fall! Rick - Poquoson, VA *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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