We likewise have a Sealline 115L Pro-pack, and it is my favorite of our large portage dry bags. It is rarely excessively heavy because we use a barrel for food stuffs and cookware.
We have both a 30L and 60L barrel, although we use the 60L exclusively on 4-person family trips. In that guise it is very heavy, enough so that one of my sons gets to tote it. The 60L has a crappy minimalist harness which may account for some of my discomfort and dislike.
On solo trips I use the 30L barrel, even on multi-week trips. On difficult to access ledge sites the 60L barrel is more than I want flopping around on my back while I attempt to scramble uphill. Again, the harness sucks and I’d guess that using a well designed harness on a 60Lbarrel is worth the expense*.
I start off with the odoriferous and attractant food in the 30 and the sealed, no-odor and freeze dried excess in a small dry bag, which I slowly empty into the 30L barrel as space allows. Granted my tripping food is nothing to brag about, but I’ve managed a 22 day trip with just the 30L barrel and a supplementary stash.
Having used a barrel for food storage for the past decade I can’t imagine using anything else. Previously we had used 5 gallon gasket sealed buckets, but the lip on the screw on lid proved rodent nibble-able. Coming back to camp after a day paddle and finding wee shards of chewed plastic scattered under the food bucket happened more than once. And of course dry bagging anything, even cookware with residual food odor, leads to this:
So far, so good; our barrels have never been nibbled or gnawed.
Two things that make a barrel more convenient for my purposes. I have a small minicel wedge glued to the bottom of my tripping canoes that is located to effectively trap the barrel tight against a thwart. Having a barrel weight suddenly shift in the canoe is disconcerting. Plus I can gently drop the barrel into the hull and there it is, exactly in place and held tight.
The other convenience is barrel organization. Ostrom makes (or made?) some cylindrical soft side containers that fit inside barrels for food segregation. They looked cool, but I’m not sure they were more effective or efficient than simply using four stuff bags to separate breakfast, lunch/snacks, dinner and stove/fuel/cookware. The lid diameter of a barrel is smaller than its girth, so stuff bags go in and out and conform to available space better.
After eating I put the next needed meal’s stuff bag on top, so I don’t need to empty the barrel or forage blindly at arm’s length. That works well enough, although in transport the stuff bags still jostle around and change places. The stuff bags are different colors, which would allow me to grab the right one at a glance if I wasn’t colorblind (and forgetful, was breakfast green or orange?. . . . what color was the stove bag?. . . . crap, not that one . . . . )
To alleviate my confusion I have little tags on the ends of the stuff bag drawstrings, labeled “breakfast”, “cookware” etc. The little end tag solution works well enough that I have added similarly labeled tags to the drawstrings on a lot of our tents and other stuff bagged gear. This has been especially effective with tripping truck gear, which tends towards creeping disarray.
http://www.canoetripping.net/forums/forum/gear/miscellaneous/18093-stuff-bag-labels
Most of those label tags are wee rectangles of laminated paper with a hole punch for the drawstring. Those are weightless, but also flimsy enough that I have torn a couple off in rough handling. I’m still searching for the ideal label tag; something small, flexible and re-writable.
Best I’ve found are these:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Flexible-Key-Ring-ID-Tags/19512262
2 inches long x ¾ inch tall, 86 cents for a three pack. I found them in with the fishing gear.
The downside to a hardshell container is that it never gets any smaller as the trip progresses, and I don’t comingle my food odor stuff with other gear, so there is often a lot of void space in the barrel at the end of a trip.
*BTW, barrel harnesses are pricey. Before you toss that battered and patched Pro-line 115L dry bag. . . . .why lookee there, a 30L barrel fits easily inside the 115 bag, with room to spare on the sides and top for other gear that need not be waterproofed. Hmmmmm. . . . .
And of course there’s the convenience of a blue barrel folding tabletop.
That tabletop is secured to the barrel handles via a couple strips of Velcro and folds to fit inside the barrel
I’ve made a lighter version using Coroplast corrugated plastic, but I don’t portage long or far, and usually bring the wood version.
Having a flat, level and cleanable cooking surface located at seated height is hella nice, and I am surprised that there is no lightweight manufactured version of a folding barrel tabletop.
