Woods_Walker wrote on May 21^st, 2009 at 1:43pm:

When you plan a trip… just how planned are you?

Depends on whether it's a base-camp trip or if I will be moving around a lot.  The more I plan to move, the more moved I am to plan.  For basecamp trips or on routes I know well, I'm pretty loosey-goosey with the planning.  

If I'll be moving daily or close to it, especially in new areas, I'll plan much more extensively.  I'll gather intelligence all winter (Hey Bo, do you know of any Japanese radar installations or alien spaceship landing sites on my route that would be neat to see?) and as I do so I just have a MS-Word file open where I dump everything that I gather.  Once I have figured out what's to see and do, and get portage, campsite, and fishing info, I will transfer some of that info onto my maps and organize the rest into a trip "rutter" (a rutter was a set of sailing instructions for unfamiliar waters used by explorers and ship captains during the so-called Age of Exploration).  I'll print this out on waterproof paper and bring it on the trip.


Quote:

Do you lay out your complete trip by the day, planning fishing & day tripping days? Or are you like me & go with whatever the day brings.

Yeah, I lay it all out, but then once I'm on the trip I don't necessarily feel tied to the plan.  I like to be in control instead of being controlled by a schedule, even one I've written.  Most times I'm reasonably close to the script though.


Quote:

Do you bring a watch & eat at specified times? I have never taken a watch & stop to eat when one of us is hungry.

I bring a watch because I can't function without knowing the time.  That said, I eat when I'm hungry.  The watch just allows me to extract the maximum possible time on the water out of each day.


Quote:

I generally pack food in general & then decide each time what we want to eat. We usually end up over packing food & carrying it out with us. I guess I would like to know how others do it? I usually travel with only one other person, but in August I will be leading a trip with 8 people.

I plan my meals first, devising a master menu for the trip.  This menu comes along for the trip in a ziplock.  Then I make a "grub list" for the trip which contains every single item I'll need to prepare and eat each meal, along with the quantity needed.  Each dish is packed in it's own ziplock but I rarely if ever pack entire meals together.  Once on the trip, I will mix and match side dishes as necessary to go with whatever quantity of fish we'll be eating (ranging from zero to 100% fish).  Some side dishes are smaller and some are larger to facilitate this.  There's usually a dessert or two and a couple main dishes along for the ride, which may or may not get eaten.  This, along with whatever trail mix is leftover, is my emergency food ration.

I always track how much of every item comes on a trip and how much was leftover, if any.  I know, for example, I'll need about 2 oz of syrup per person per meal of pancakes and that when we have cheese and sausage tortillas for lunch we'll use about 1/4# of sausage each.  By knowing all of these per person averages, it's easy to plan meals for a big or small group (and the bigger the group, the better these averages work).  I'll fine tune things a bit if I know the preferences of those on the trip, going heavier or lighter on certain items based on their likes and dislikes.  After many years of doing this, I don't haul much food out of the woods at the end of each trip.