Journaling on your trip.

[Rippy]

Brad said in another thread that he intended to get a Rite in the Rain note pad to keep a diary of trips and a place to sketch. I was saddened by the thought that he hadn't been journaling his trips. Now I like to tease Brad allot, but when he cuts loose with an essay it's spellbinding. Back in 2008 while picking up some last minute things for a Fall trip I found a 5" x 8" hardcover journal with I suppose about 50 pages in Wally World. It is ruled front and back. A spiral note pad would have worked but I wanted to document my outings on something more permanent. Besides re-reading it in the winters I had the idea that some future grandchild might be interested in what his crazy old grand dad did in the out doors. I take it on trips with me and each day try to write the highlights as well as my thoughts.
I note the overnight temps and general weather conditions, wildlife seen, which camp sites I stayed at, star gazing etc. I note how I'm doing both mentally and physically.

Last night I read my journal again. Its interesting to read where you were in life and compare to where you are now. I noticed that in 2008 on my solo trip I was lonely and greatly missed my son who was in college. In 2012 my son asked to go along on my Fall trip and we had a good adventure. We took two canoes so we could solo paddle. I took him on a loop trip to my favorite campsite in the BWCA. Some how it was a healing for my heart for in 2013 on my solo trip I didn't feel lonely.

Tell me about your journaling in hopes to inspire those that don't to try it.

While it has nothing to do with the topic, I decided to share some pics from 2012. They go together with the memories in my journal. The last picture of our two canoes parked together for unloading is my favorite. I hope to see them together again.

 

[memaquay]

Very Nice! When I travel with the school kids, I journal every day, mostly for professional reasons. Keeping track of problems, illnesses, etc. As a result, I seldom journal my own trips, usually I just write down times during the day. When I write up a trip report when I get back, I look at the pictures and GPS info and go from memory. Not having to write at the end of every day is quite refreshing for me!

 

[Rippy]

I hadn't considered that. Being a teacher you might like to get away from writing. I work with my hands rewinding electric motors and some times I swear I'm going to forget how to spell my own name (which seems to be growing lately).

 

[Hanz]

I do. I've learned that keeping a journal or log really helps me in many, many ways. The written words on the page help my memories flourish. They also help me to learn from my mistakes. I have logs for a few different activities - I enjoy going back through them.

 

[Mihun09]

I journal every trip. I keep track of portage lengths and which side of the river they may be on, especially when we are doing a well travelled route and no information exists. I usually write each evening, lounge, write, remember the day. I have one filled hard cover book which covered the first 4 years and there are maps in it from new lakes for depths and where the best fishing was. Started a new book last year.

 

[Alan Gage]

It's something I mean to do but rarely actually take the time for anymore. I used to keep a daily journal for a couple years and as long as I stayed in the habit sitting down to write every day or two was a pleasure. But now that the habit is broken it's hard for me to pick it up again. I'll sometimes write while on a trip but usually I try to write something that encompasses the whole trip as soon as I get home. It's not quite the same but better than nothing.

I'll try harder but no guarantees.

Alan

 

[Canotrouge]

I always have good intention to start at the beginning of every trip, but never follow through... I should force my self to do it and ask my 7 years old to start to, it would be great for the future!!

 

[Guest]

Back in 2008 while picking up some last minute things for a Fall trip I found a 5" x 8" hardcover journal with I suppose about 50 pages in Wally World. It is ruled front and back. A spiral note pad would have worked but I wanted to document my outings on something more permanent

I keep a journal on every trip, and have since 1976. Back in the day I wrote in those black and white composition books, and have dozens of those in my nearly indecipherable handwriting.

Keeping a trip journal has evolved. Today I make more notes on the route, campsites and conditions than written wanderings on how I’m feeling or landscape descriptions. What has changed most over the years besides what I write is what I do with it and the physical journal I use.

With the advent of word processing and home printers those journals have become the basis for a more organized and legible trip report. In transposing the hand written stuff to an organized trip report I often omit pages of mind wandering scribble and then write more at length about something that was a simple field note.

Those trip reports are mostly for my own enjoyment, for future reference and for companions if I had any. When posting those trip reports to a paddling site I have begun to try to incorporate more information that might be of use to people researching a possible trip.

The physical journal has become more personalized as well. Keeping a trip journal is important to me and I am willing to sacrifice some weight and volume to make it easier. I trip with a small rectangular dry bag that is dedicated to my reading and writing materials; book, glasses, light, journal and pens.

The journal itself is DIY customized. I use an 8 ½ x 11 spiral binder that has fairly thick covers and an interior manila page with pockets on both sides (Mead Five Star binder). The manila pockets are wonderful for the loose papers I accumulate; permits, printed weather and tide info, pages from the little pocket notebook I use when in the boat or wandering away from camp.

Because I know my handwriting is barely legible even to me, especially when scribed on something floppy, flexible and propped on my knee, I reinforce the covers on my journal so that it becomes a sturdy little field desk. I cut 8 ½ x 11 pieces of cardboard (FedEx box cardboard works great) and spray glue those to the insides of the covers so the journal is rigid as a board.

Kind of like carrying multiple knives and lighters, I carry several pens (and a pencil). The thought of having a journal and something to write about but no implement of inscription is OCD horrifying to me.

 

[ppine]

I studied geography in college the first time around. We were taught to do lots of sketching, take slides and keep journals. Over the years I have amassed a lot of stuff but rarely look at it. Now I mostly take a few snapshots and start planning the next trip.

 

[stripperguy]

Now that you mention it, I did keep a journal on my first "on my own" canoe trip, when I was 19 years old...more of an open letter to the future MDB. I'll have to look for that, I'm sure she still has it stashed somewhere.

With that said, I keep a log of everything (everything! really) that I do in my professional life, laboratory log books, patent records, phone logs, etc.
For my personal life, I take photos, thousands and thousands of photos. I'm obsessive about adding notes at home and captions for the online stuff.
Maybe I should keep some field notes too...

 

[Philtrum]

Twenty or so canoe trips, 20 or so trip reports. They've gotten to be annotated photo albums but also have information on equipment, food, and too many other details. I take pictures of each portage and campsite landing, using the time stamps to generate paddling and portaging times. I get distances from Map Source.
I take enough notes to remember what happened after the trip, though a lot of what I write doesn't get into the final report.
Lately I've been using a notebook with paper made of stone (that's right - stone) and a pen that writes upside-down (for doing crossword puzzles while lying on my back).

 

[red langford]

I saw this handy dandy little book at Chaltrek in Thunder Bay a few years ago that has a fill in the blank style. Wind, water conditions, location, travelling partner, GPS location, food and on and on. Works really well but I fear it was one of sort of thing and will never be able to find one again. I store it with my maps and I always study the maps at night before bed and that's when I make my notes. Maybe I can try to create my own and self publish a few.

 

[Guest]

I saw this handy dandy little book at Chaltrek in Thunder Bay a few years ago that has a fill in the blank style. Wind, water conditions, location, travelling partner, GPS location, food and on and on. Works really well but I fear it was one of sort of thing and will never be able to find one again. I store it with my maps and I always study the maps at night before bed and that's when I make my notes. Maybe I can try to create my own and self publish a few.

It would be fairly easy to recreate a similar Fill in the Blanks format, and there are a variety of office supply store home bindings or clip fasteners that could hold it together.

When I am prepping for a trip I print out the 10-day weather forecast, carry it with me and note the day’s actual weather beside the printed forecast for comparison funsies.

When I’m on a long trip far from home I can find a wi-fi spot and have a look at WeatherUnderground or etc, but I can’t print that forecast, so I carry copies of a Fill in the Blank weather forecast spreadsheet.

Five sets of rows down the side, labeled Day/Date, Temperature, Chance Precip. Cloud Cover, Wind Speed/direction, and four columns across the top for 6am, 12 noon, 6pm and 12 midnight. All I have to write is a few numbers and letters in the blank boxes, and two pieces of 8 ½ x 11 paper provide room for a 10-day forecast.

Those completed sheets, and the “dang they got that wrong” field notations live with my trip reports.

 

[riverstrider]

I like that idea about bringing along the 10 day forecast so it can be compared to actual experiences, Mike! I usually take just some basic notes on what the weather is like, but not too specific. More like "It rained like heck" instead of "Heavy precipitation, temperature 54 degrees".

I do try to keep a journal of my trips, but they are more like basic place-keeper notes intended to trigger my more detailed memory of the day's events. I am blessed with a semi-photographic memory and can recall fine visual, auditory and even olfactory details, so I don't need to write things in a lot of detail in order to later use those notes in a blog post that goes in a lot more detail. So, I basically just bring along a pen and/or pencil and a small spiral notebook to take notes in my tent at the end of the day.

-rs

 

[yellowcanoe]

Never journaled and now I sometimes regret.Some ports are etched in my mind in WCPP but for the life of me I can't name the lakes I fell and cursed between.
I have never worried much about the weather. I can read clouds pretty well just cause I have for eons.. No special expertise. Though It would be handy to note cloud pattern, if I thought it would rain and if it actually did.
Plus most of the areas I go into in Ontario have no radio reception. Those AM relay stations are pretty limited in range.

Two years ago I got scared out of my mind. We were just out of a harbor on Lake Superior with the next landing at Pukaskwa River three miles away. Looking to the west we saw a black line from north all the way to the south horizon. It looked like a heck of a sqall. We paddled for all we could.. making about three mph into a headwind.. the black cloud got closer bigger and more ominous. We had about half a mile to go.. Paddling for all we were worth we were glad that we could get up the river in back of the campsite and pull out in calm water eddy. Just then the cloud arrived. Flinging ourselves on the ground.. we were ...enveloped in soft cold fog..

No squall. But the fog persisted all day. Thank goodness for books. firewood and Sudoku and a tarp.
I don't need a journal to remind me of that pucker up time.

 

[Odyssey]

Nice photos Dave, thanks for sharing those. And thanks for sharing their illustration of something very personal. I'll try not to go off on a tangent here, but I understand the parent-child separation anxiety thing. As for photos, I tell every young couple with young kids 'Take lots of photos. Anything will do. Don't make an art project out of everything, just snap those little memories." I wish I had.
As far as little memories go, I wish I had applied the same approach to canoe tripping, both in taking pics and jotting down notes. My memory is poor, and that's no joke. I / we have probably tripped fewer than a couple dozen times, but I struggle to remember four trips. The same goes for everything in life. My memory is full of large gaps. Maybe we're all the same? It bothers me greatly when the kids and my wife will reminisce "how about that time when" and I'll be sitting there clueless. "Huh? Was I there?" Having trip notes of where, when, and "how about that time" would be great, not just for me, but to share with our kids too. I'd hate to start taking note of anything and everything every day, but isn't that just called a diary? The idea of keeping a diary is really growing on me. This thread is helpful to me. I love reading people's trip reports, and the photos are eye candy too; but I most love the trip writings, long or short. They're like short stories. Aren't people's lives stories in a way? Some of those books listed in the other threads of canoe related literature are just trip reports from another age. They're all wonderful reads, whether they're from 1915 Labrador or from 2014 Florida, New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ontario, Montana...It all starts with trip notes.
Thanks every one. Please keep joining in with your approach to trip notes. While you might be alone on your paddle trail, there are countless others who'd love to follow along. Until recently I'd not given enough thought to this. I'm often sitting a little clueless.

 

[Alan Gage]

Interesting to hear everyone else's approach.

I think the key, at least for me, is to write something, anything, every single day. Just to stay in the habit. Two traps are very easy for me to fall into:

1: Nothing interesting happened today so there's no need to write anything

2: Wow, a lot happened today but I don't have time to write it all up tonight. I'll wait until tomorrow when I have more time

Both instances have the same result. At best you'll forget some interesting tidbits by waiting a day. More likely, for me, is that nothing will ever get written down. The habit just got broken and tomorrow I'll put it off another day, and another, and another etc.. Then the thought of starting again seems overwhelming because so much has happened since I last wrote anything down.

As I mentioned earlier I used to keep a daily journal. Some of it was kept digitally and some in notebooks. I found it very enjoyable and it made me a much better writer. I can tell how much I've slipped whenever I read something I wrote 6 years ago. I haven't done anything of the sort for a long time and I miss it sometimes. I haven't read through more than a handful of those entries since I made them. Perhaps this weekend I'll take a stroll town memory lane. Maybe it will inspire me to start again.

Alan

 

[Philtrum]

Alan, I agree with you about writing something even if there's nothing much to say. For example:

The rest of this exciting day goes like so:
Read.
Watch loons cavort and run on the water (mating displays?)
Watch a merganser fish.
Note people in the area.
Eat.
Find a tick on the chair and do a thorough self-inspection.
Wait out a downpour in the early afternoon.
Eat.

Or this:

Today'’s agenda is challenging:
Eat
Adjust tarp
Walk around
Adjust tarp
Eat
Adjust tarp
Take photos
Watch squirrels
Adjust tarp
Read
Do crossword puzzles
Eat
Adjust tarp

Or this:

Today's agenda: Eat, sit, fix stuff, get water, eat, read, rehydrate chicken, read some more, sit some more, take a few pictures – whew! – eat some more, get water, go to bed.

These little mementoes bring a chuckle years later.

 

[Guest]

I like that idea about bringing along the 10 day forecast so it can be compared to actual experiences

I have a pretty good “weather eye” just from being out in various conditions over the years, but I think some of my weather appreciation, what happens when an X front is moving in, and then through, and what happens afterwards, is a result of that weatherkeeping. I can see the patterns in what was predicted, what actually happened and what happened next, especially in areas where I can pick up a signal on the weather radio.

Much as I detest electronics in the backcountry I am addicted to the weather radio at least once a day when I can get a signal. I write the basics of that NOAA forecast on that printed 10 day sheet each day, and update it every day. Watching (reading) that weather radio change day by day has been an education in pattern recognition.

Admittedly that pattern recognition is only reliable in areas where I have long experience. Plunk me down the wilds of the Pacific NW and I’d be lost weatherwise. When paddling far from my usual haunts that is all the more reason I want to bring in a forecast, and update it when possible.

I can read clouds pretty well just cause I have for eons.. No special expertise. Though It would be handy to note cloud pattern, if I thought it would rain and if it actually did.


Thank goodness for books.

Kim, you might enjoy this:

http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Collect...+handbook&pebp=1422806951662&peasin=811875423

It is kind of a cross between a field guide, a score card and a miniature coffee table book with stunning photographs.

 

[yellowcanoe]

Thanks but I have a pretty good guide that I used for Registered Maine Guide training.. We were tested on clouds.