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Being easy to reach is an important point. I usually have a whistle in a pfd pocket but hadn't thought too much about accessibility until an incident on a multi day Buffalo river trip. There had been rain overnight and the river was rising as we were packing up. In hindsight launching that...

Good point about microfiber melting! That would definitely limit usefulness for things like grabbing a pot off the fire. Hadn't considered that limitation. I may still try cutting a bandana size square out of a larger microfiber towel, even if it wouldn't be a 104.

Probably the oldest item I take regularly, partly for nostalgia, is the Sierra Club cup I got in 1969 when my family went on a Sierra Club boundary waters trip. The leader's gear list for participants included a Sierra Club cup with name written on the bottom. The idea was that when you wore...

A few years ago I bought a Roll-A-Cot after reading recommendations on one of the paddling websites. A Thermarest mattress on top of that is real luxury camping! Even though it is a bit lighter weight and more compact than some cots, the Roll-A-Cot is a bit big for fitting in with other...

After considering the possibility of a similar situation in the context of a day trip my thought has been to carry an Esbit stove with 2 or 3 fuel cubes, a metal cup, and a couple of packets of hot chocolate or hot cider mix. I'm envisioning huddling over the Esbit stove with a cup of water...

Years ago my dad and brothers tried some kind of desensitizing drops that were a very very dilute solution of poison oak extract. These drops had to be taken regularly over a period of time. My brothers still got rashes when their Boy Scout troop went hiking and camping in areas with poison...

My parents gave me the family Old Town Otca in 1986 when they were moving from California to Oregon. I lived in a second story apartment at the time with absolutely no place to store a 17 ft canoe, so a brother in Oregon stored it in his garage for me for a year until I could drive out from...

I too have an MSR Mugmate. It gets used at home when I want a single cup and sometimes camping unless I'm going for the simplicity of instant. I let it steep as the directions say and adjust the amount of grounds to get suitable strength. It does result in a lot of sediment in the mug. The...

The mention of Sierra Club cups at the start of this thread got me to reminiscing about growing up in a Sierra Club family. I realized it was 50 years ago that my family went on a Boundary Waters national Sierra Club outing, which is when I got a Sierra Club cup of my own. Before that on...

Two pots, one for heating water and one for use with food is what I usually bring. Am very happy with the GSI Halulite 1.8L tea kettle which has been a great upgrade from a basic pot for heating water for hot drinks and such. Have an assortment of stainless steel and aluminum cook pots, but...

You can buy plastic disks with carpeting, somewhat along the line of what Yohawk posted, which are designed for putting under things like sofa legs to protect hardwood floors. I use those with a roll-a-cot when luxury camping, though had to tape some less slippery material to the plastic to...

How hot does it need to get to start softening? One of my brothers once had one of those very cheap dome tents with a plastic floor. The seam between the tent floor and wall needed some sealer and not having seam sealer handy my brother figured he'd try sealing it with hot glue since it was a...

A couple of my Thermarest stuff sacks developed that very sticky but not smelly condition. I tried soaking in a warm concentrated solution of Tide detergent. I think one I just washed that way which significantly reduced the sticky feel and then after drying coated with talcum powder to take...

I'm in the process of attempting gelcoat repair on my placid flashfire, trying to follow instructions provided by Placid Boatworks: https://youtu.be/ljlghfoDwyA Hard to tell from the pictures, but if the underlying fabric on your canoe is not broken and it is just gelcoat chipped off then...

Somewhere on one of the canoeing forums I read that turning a delta shape hull (like the Advantage) is a matter of skidding the stern rather than drawing the bow into a new direction. Focusing on skidding the stern around rather than trying to move the bow made a big difference for me in...

One of my favorite discontinued items is the Lafuma Maxi Pop-up Butterfly chair. For awhile Lafuma had discontinued the aluminum frame ones and substituted a steel frame which was a little heavier. Now they don't list either of these. The pair I have are aluminum frame. Light weight, very...

This statement from S-Tech isn't quite accurate. They seem to have switched units from one sentence to the next so that comparing the quoted numbers is meaningless. The numbers in the first sentence appear to be giving relative density (to air), not an actual density value. The density value...