Wild Camping Kit Advice | Trip and Expedition Planning | CKC Forum

Let's kick off a discussion to help people plan and improve their preparedness for self-sufficient sea paddling and wild camping!

Kit List

See attached a modified version of a Kit List first developed for a Scotland trip a couple of years ago to help with planning for a self-sufficient / wild camping expedition.  The list is a guide only and should not be read in hard and fast terms - others have made their own lists too – hopefully they'll post theirs up too and we'll end up with some good advice for everyone. 

Dry Bags

In terms of dry bags – basically you can't have enough small dry bags!  Don't get big ones because you will struggle to get them in the hatches packed!  As an absolute minimum you will typically need 2 x 25 litre dry bags or 1 x 25 or 1 x 15 litre dry bag – but I cannot emphasise this too much, you probably cannot have enough small dry bags!  Take a good stash of bin bags as well! 

The things you should concentrate on keeping in the dry bags is sleeping bags and clothes, i.e. things you really do not want to get wet!  Things like tents, roll mats and shoes can just be wrapped in black bin bags and put straight into the hatches.

Cooking Stoves

Learning from experience taking cooking stoves that require gas overseas requires you making the right purchasing choice in the UK – it seems the UK has an abundance of stoves all with differing gas cylinder requirements, many of which are not available overseas!  Gas cylinders and meths obviously cannot be carried on planes. 

To be safe choose a stove which works on canisters with self-sealing safety valve and international standard screw threads!  Just make sure you get enough but not too much gas though – a 450g cylinder is probably more than enough for two cooking for 6 days. 

If you use a Trangia without a gas convertor kit, meths is usually readily available - and Andy has used a Greenheat Fuel Cell (http://www.greenheat.co.za/) in his Trangia for the last few expeditions which worked pretty well and can obviously be carried on a plane.