Camping and Fishing – The Beginning of the cthewild blog
Introduction to the motivation behind cthewild
Table of Contents
Welcome to my remote camping memories.
I am using this as a ‘memory repository’ to hold my favorite recollections of past fishing and camping trips to Canada. That’s all this is at the moment.
I do encourage you to look around and read an article or two if you are interested in the ramblings of someone who is rapidly approaching the age where memories can sometimes fail.
Maybe you’ll find something here that triggers a camping memory of your own, or possibly inspires you to share your own camping stories.
As a lot of authors do – I’ll start at the beginning.
Camping Memories - The VERY Beginning
I grew up on a farm in NW Pa. with 2 brothers.
We didn’t always have a lot of free time but when we did you could usually find us climbing trees, playing in the woods, camping out and just doing what young boys do.
Our father was a very unique individual and he believed in the traditional things from his generation, mainly hard work and clean living.
He was a lover of the outdoors and he knew every plant that was edible, he excelled at hunting and trapping and he truly enjoyed the serenity of camping in the wild.
He had been indoctrinated into the Canadian wilds as a youngster with many camping and fishing trips north with his family, and later he became an avid moose hunter.
So, it was only natural that he wanted to show his boys what he loved so much.
Our Indoctrination to the Remote Wilderness
To fully understand what these trips were like, it’s important to know that my dad was a believer in traveling and camping light.
Usually, included in the packs would be a box or two of Bisquick which could be used for many things – pancakes, fish batter, biscuits (who would have thought!) and if I really tried hard, I imagine I could actually remember some of this stuff all cooked up and used for bait.
Another staple in the camping supplies would be brown sugar and butter. This would become the ‘syrup’ for our pancakes.
Generous mounts of melted butter with brown sugar mixed in made a wonderful topping.
Of course there would be a fry pan, some small aluminum spoons, forks and plates (1 each) and a box of waterproofed matches.
All of the rest of the food would be either caught, captured, or picked from the environment.
As for camping equipment, we would each have a sleeping bag encased in a plastic garbage bag to keep it dry during the portage in to the lake(s) and there would be a single large piece of heavy black plastic which would serve as our ‘tent’. (the tent to the left is an upgraded version).
This ‘tent’ could easily be folded into a square of maybe 9 or 10 inches per side so it wasn’t terribly extravagant.
Perhaps a couple of short pieces of rope, and of course an ax that was sharp enough to shave with.
Finally our fishing gear. Again, this was ‘minimalist’ at it’s finest.
What worked for sunfish back home also worked for the bigger things that we would sometimes get a hold of up in the north.
A few shiny spoons, and a few rusty bare hooks for the occasional worm or leech.
Of course the rods were the least expensive available at the local Murphy’s store and the reels were proudly made by Zebco and had been passed down from generation to generation.
Usually the line that was spooled into these reels was the very same line that they had come with many years before.
'Other Gear'
Our clothing consisted of what we wore on the way up plus an extra set for the inevitable drenching we all would take at one time or another.
Rain gear was another plastic garbage bag with holes cut for the arms and duct tape to keep it from flopping around on a skinny young lad.
Pretty much anything one needs to survive can be made or fixed with garbage bags and duct tape.
All of this would be packed into several ‘pack baskets’.
For those of you who know what a pack basket is, then you can skip the description.
For those of you who don’t, try to imagine filling a large box with camping equipment and tying it across your back.
Pack baskets were just that, except instead of light cardboard that would fall apart when it got wet the first time, they were made with a million woven strips of heavier wood which wouldn’t actually fall apart until they had gotten wet 2 or 3 times.
They also didn’t last terribly long if they were set to close to the fire and then forgotten about.
However, they did encourage the building of strong muscles in young boys and could even improvise as a camp chair (and I’ve see them fitted with a toilet seat as well. Use your imagination.)
which wouldn’t actually fall apart until they had gotten wet 2 or 3 times.
They also didn’t last terribly long if they were set to close to the fire and then forgotten about.
However, they did encourage the building of strong muscles in young boys and could even improvise as a camp chair (and I’ve see them fitted with a toilet seat as well. Use your imagination.)
The water transportation consisted of 1 or 2 aluminum Smoker-craft canoes with a square stern.
The square stern allowed for our only luxury – small (think tiny – 3 or 4 hp.) outboard motors that would usually start somewhere around the 953rd pull of the rope and propel you across the lake only slightly slower than the massive swarm of mosquitoes and black flies that were always chasing you.
All of this stuff was loaded into or on an old suburban and then we would crawl in and prepare ourselves for the mind numbing drive ahead.
Some trips were shorter and some longer depending on the destination but I’ll leave that for another time…
Rod