FIELD DISPATCH: East Fork Lake

This weekend I camped out at East Fork Lake State Park in Ohio. The weather was great for the most part, and I was able to relax some, do a bit of campfire cooking, hike, and use some of my bush craft gear that I made.

The Gear

This was the first camping trip I took with my girlfriend, and she is a fan of Ozark Trail gear from Walmart. The tent she brought was a 6 person dome, which translates to 3 normal sized Americans. Much in the way that FRS radios exaggerate their range by a factor of 10, tents exaggerate their occupancy by a factor of at least 2.

For a number of reasons, mostly having to do with the fact that Nixon was still president when I was born, I don’t sleep on the ground. I have these fancy Teton sleeping pads and cots, but for this trip I did not take the cots. This is the second camping trip I have taken without my cots, and I don’t think I will be making that mistake again. Even when I was in the Army, I mostly slept on cots out in the field. If I do a proper backpacking trip, I think I am going to require a hammock or something.

It got down to the low 50’s at night, and my 0 degree sleeping bag was just right with just shorts and a t-shirt. I could definitely sleep colder with more layers. Saturday night got pretty cold, I was able to wear shorts and sandals by the fire, but I needed a sweatshirt.

The Comms

I took my radio and I made a few CQ calls on 146.520, but I didn’t hear anything back. I think it’s time to look into a mobile/portable setup for making contacts away from home. LTE data was present, but not reliable at the camp site. I was able to listen to music by the campfire with no difficulty. I am currently between field smart phones, so I used my iPhone for everything. It was fine, but I wasn’t doing anything dangerous either.

The Food

Cooking was mostly burgers and sausages. The girlfriend is a Brit, so American hot dogs are not really her thing. I don’t eat pork, so I tend to go for turkey sausages instead of hot dogs. Friday night was sausages and instant mashed potatoes. Saturday night was turkey burgers and beans. Breakfast was eggs, turkey bacon, and turkey sausages, with toast. I opted to take bottled cappuccino coffee this trip, just to see what it was like for breakfast. It’s probably refreshing in warmer weather. Lunch was lunch meat sandwiches. Here’s a bit of fun: The Brit confused “trail mix” with “Chex Mix” and was consequently disappointed in the snack options.

The Fun

I figured it would be too cold to swim, plus I wasn’t really packed for it anyway. But I did get to visit the beach. I did a bit of hiking as well.

Bush Crafting

I made some jungle knots from paracord. Jungle knots are a strand of cord doubled over with overhand knots tied every couple of inches or so. The purpose is to connect the cords together using the knots and the loops. They have a number of uses. Their two uses on this trip were to extend my ridge line so that I could hang my tarp over the tent. My ridge line is about 50 feet (15.24 meters) in length, but on this particular campsite, the trees were really far apart. So I used two sets of jungle knots to wrap around one tree, and another to wrap around the other, making the total line significantly longer. This was my first time deploying my ridge line with carabiners to save wear on my ridge line.

I had made 4 sets of jungle knots, and I ended up using all 4 sets, 3 to extend the ridge line, and 1 as a guy line for the tarp: