— Brinestorm

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Tag "camping"

This is a packing test for my 2-week Vancouver Island trip.
I wound up using at least five more dry bags than shown here!

This is the second in a series of articles detailing what I learned on a 2-week kayak journey on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, a trip with four others that ranged from the South Brooks Peninsula to the northern tip of Nootka Island.

Of course, if you’re camping out of a kayak, you need to find a way to pack all your stuff in your boat. But what many inexperienced kayak campers don’t realize is that you need to re-pack your boat every. Single. Day. Doing this every day for two weeks solid makes you pretty self-critical of your packing strategy!

Having just gone through this myself, I thought I’d offer my own take on some of the harrowed, classic kayaking strategies and some new discoveries I made on my own.

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LazerBrite: Far more flexible, bright, and useful than glowsticks, and way less disposable.

LazerBrite: Far more flexible, bright, and useful than glowsticks, and way less disposable.

Ever stop to think what happens to those glowsticks that you use for night paddles, outdoor raves, and other silly and sundry purposes? Well, you kind of just throw them away. They’re not treated as hazardous waste…but they probably should be.

Diphenyl oxalate, also known under the brand name Cyalume, is what makes many glowsticks work. It has been poorly studied regarding its environmental effects, but is widely known as an irritant that burns soft tissue and isn’t meant to be ingested. So that can’t be good. Non-Cyalume glowsticks may even use phthalates, which are seriously bad news, environmentally speaking. Regardless, they’re single-use items entirely made of plastic. Yay, humanity! Good job! I can’t, in good conscience, use them anymore.

Enter Lazerbrite.

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