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Life on board our raft turned out to be even more comfortable and pleasant than we'd hoped it would be. We discovered that it is really convenient to travel with our home, and not have to reassemble it every night (as backpackers have to do)! Also, we didn't have to worry much about how high or low the tide would go, since we would automatically ride above it. We could carry more with us on the raft than we could have carried backpacking, by contrast, so raft life felt relatively luxurious. We had a cooler for storage of cold food and a bin (that slid under the tent platform) full of dry food. We ate plenty of fresh veggies and fruit. Normally I hate the daily obligation to prepare meals in the midst of an otherwise busy life, but life on our raft was so leisurely by comparison, I rediscovered a love for cooking. I found I began meals well in advance, and happily daydreamed my way through their preparation. I would have gladly shared food preparation chores with Arlen, but he had no interest, and I enjoyed them--so I did them all. Arlen did develop some skill with making desserts, however.
In preparation for our last few trips, I prepared a lot of meals ahead of time by combining ingredients in zip-lock bags. I used recipes created especially for backpackers. Over the years, we haven't repeated the more bizarre of our food experiments (Salmon in Tomato Orange Sauce, for example), but we've held onto our favorites (Alpine Spaghetti and Potatoes & Mushrooms, etc.). I cooked using our whitegas-burning backpacking stove. I was nervous about cooking on the raft, because of the fire hazard. I thought I'd be able to cook on a rock or dirt on shore, but that proved unrealistic most of the time, largely due to competition from waves. On most trips, we brought a laminate-covered board from home that became our stove surface. The best solution turned out to be the piece of granite we brought as a cooking surface on our 2003 trip. Protecting the stove from the wind was often a major challenge. Sometimes I had to position the stove's windscreen, my body, and our gear bins strategically around the stove in order to cook.
We carried fresh water in six-gallon plastic containers.
We planned to carry all the waste we generated back home with us; we wanted our adventure to have a minimal impact on the river. Anyone who visited us out on the river usually paddled away with a small bag of our trash. :-) We took a plastic 40-gallon drum with us the first year to hold waste water. It turned out to be way larger than we needed, so we carried a much smaller container the other summers. We also carried a folding shovel with us, in case we needed to bury any waste (usually scrapings from a cooking pot) inland from shore. Our chemical toilet served us well. Its holding tank was getting full just as our first two trips ended. On subsequent trips, we paddled home with the holding tank halfway through our adventure to empty it.
We wore casual, comfortable clothes on our trip. I layered loose cozy warm things over cool cotton things. Arlen wore t-shirts and shorts when he wasn't in his swimsuit. I intended that we would wear our reef-runner shoes all the time, but our feet ended up needing more air, especially as they were wet most of the time. It was a good thing we'd built the deck of the raft out of cedar; neither of us ever had to deal with a splinter. I insisted that we both wear something on our feet when we set foot off the raft, though; we didn't need the panic of trying to get medical help for stitches from where we were. We each took rain jackets and pants on the trips but, even during days of torrential rain, I don't think Arlen ever put his on.
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