Windy Tops

Tag: toys

  • Detecting a faulty baseplate compass

    A Silva Field 7 Baseplate Compass
    My Silva Field 7 Baseplate Compass.

    Usually when intuition says one thing and a compass says something else, it means your intuition is wrong. More than a few times, I or a group I’ve been in have had a compass bearing telling us to go one way that intuitively seemed completely wrong, and after some time it’s turned out that we really were meant to push through an area that looked completely un-navigable. A couple of times, my sense of direction has become bizarrely flipped somehow inside my head, only to be corrected by a compass. On occasion, this has resulted in my sitting down in a flummoxed state for a few minutes trying to flip my head over, but it usually works out.

    One problem with a compass, though, is that the needle can occasionally flip—the south pole of the needle becomes north, and north becomes south, meaning the red end of the compass points south instead of north. This is exactly what happened to me on this occasion. The needle flipping actually happened some time before I left, and happened to be wrong when I first pulled it out to use it whilst inside visually encumbering cloud at 1400 metres elevation. Flipped needles are often a consequence of exposure to iron, in the same way that you can easily magnetise a pin by stroking it with a magnet a few times. In my case, I didn’t have a clue what’d caused it because my compass spends most of its time sitting on a shelf, but there are many things that might have caused it. Clearly this can be a problem, and if you’re trying to navigate it can also be a little risky if you’ve not realised what’s happening.

    There are a few ways to detect this in the field, though, and I’m keen to hear of any that I don’t mention here. Obviously if you know where you are and can see a known landmark, you can compare the compass to see if the needle’s pointing where you’d expect. If you have multiple compasses, you can compare them and at the very least determine if one compass is misbehaving. In my case, the first sign was that it tried to point me directly back the way I’d just come from, but in most such cases I’d still expect a compass to be more correct than my own intuition. Fortunately my GPS (usually packed away) includes an electronic magnetic compass, which I spent a few minutes calibrating, then compared the two.

    There’s yet another sign which might be common knowledge, but I can’t find any references on the ‘net so I thought I might share it. What should have been a dead giveaway for arousing suspicion in my case, especially in hindsight, was that the weighting of the needle within the compass was completely wrong.
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  • Research of Interesting Outdoor Whistles

    Several years ago, and soon after a couple of occasions when I’d wanted a whistle on very short notice but didn’t have one, I went out to buy a whistle to attach to my pack. With very little research I bought a Fox40 Classic whistle because it was easy to find and because their marketing said they were fantastic, and also that they were the "standard choice for personal safety and rescue professionals worldwide". Besides giving me greater opportunities to annoy people, I thought that maybe it’d be useful in a SAR situation some day, too.

    Sadly I felt let down after some time. Despite the Fox40’s ability to momentarily deafen me any time I blew it, I found it often didn’t annoy people at a distance in an open space, or even reach their ears, as much as I hoped. I put this down to various issues in the bush, like the frequency of corners little hillocks around which sound probably wouldn’t be travelling well, and probably also some audio absorbing properties of thick vegetation. Recently though, I was pointed to some research that’s been done on whistles, and (even better) it’s about the effectiveness of different whistles in New Zealand back-country conditions.

    Specifically, in 2006 a group of New Zealand Youth Search and Rescue members ran tests that compared a variety of whistles, as well as a giant honker and “yelling and screaming”. The tests have very recently been updated in 2012 to include comparisons of some extra whistles that were provided by Safety Whistles NZ. [Edit 9-Sep-2015: The above-linked page is no longer available, but it’s helpfully still hosted by the WayBack machine.]

    From personal experience I’m not surprised in hindsight that the Fox40 whistle tested badly, coming 6th out of 7 whistles and (after the 2012 tests) being barely comparable with a newly tested Safety Whistle. I was surprised by a couple of things, though.
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  • My new GPS and digital red-lining

    I’ve spent the last few weeks playing with GPS receivers, initially with Craig‘s old one and very basic Garmin eTrex which he loaned me. (Thanks Craig!) A basic eTrex was certainly nothing flash at all. Having only a low-sensitivity antennae, it barely works when there’s a tree on the horizon let alone being under bush cover. This aside, it was great having something to play with to simply get an initial idea of all the basic GPS terms and ideas. A little over three weeks ago, I finally bought my own more sophisticated Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. This new extension to my tramping hobby has also manifested itself on this blog, which is why several of the trips now have Download GPX and Load map links. (The former downloads a GPs eXchange Format file, and the latter opens a Google Maps box with the described route overlaid.) I’m hoping to keep this up in the future, and I suppose time will tell how it works out.

    It’s been a surprisingly difficult decision for me to get a GPS receiver, and not strictly because of the cost. I’ve been putting it off because I’ve really wanted to get a good feeling of how to navigate without one, and I’ve not wanted to have the temptation lying around that would encourage bad habits of using a GPS without understanding the surrounding land. I definitely think that understanding maps, compasses and (sometimes) altimeters is the way to go, perhaps with a GPS to fall back on when things get unexpectedly bad or chaotic. I certainly don’t ever want to get myself into a situation where I go out relying primarily on an electronic device that runs on batteries. There’s a stigma in some tramping circles that’s attached to openly carrying a GPS receiver. To some extent I do even agree with the origins of this stigma, I think, though mostly because there do seem to be some people out there who really are relying primarily on a GPS to get them through a tricky situation without necessarily having the more fundamental navigation expertise and experience to back it up. I suspect it’s asking for trouble, which is why I’m hoping I don’t fall into the trap myself.
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  • Claustrophobic bivy bags

    IMG_3756_c_rs
    It’s bright orange!

    I commented to Craig and a couple of others earlier this afternoon that to me it seems the most embarrassing kind of tramping accident that didn’t necessarily involve idiocy might be to become trapped inside a sleeping bag. It’s just been a pet fear of mine for a while now and something I might one day like to produce a horror movie about. I find something disconcerting about completely zipping oneself up inside a sleeping bag on a cold night without the certainty of being able to locate the zipper in the morning, or having the zipper get stuck on something and refuse to move. For some reason this leads to mental visions of a giant sealed sleeping bag bounding out of the Tararuas.

    The reason this topic of conversation arose was because I’ve taken the claustrophobia one layer further and bought myself a nice little bivy bag, primarily for emergencies and as a possible alternative to carrying around my Huntech 2 to 3 person fly as backup shelter when I’m not planning to camp.
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  • Torches, boots, hills and Wellington

    For all of today, Wellington was doing a cute thing that it does several times a year. The clouds come in low over the harbour and drift over the city. Living in the hills, it’s possible to either be inside the clouds, or above them and looking down over a flat desert of smooth drifty white. In Northland, on the western side of the Tinakori Hill, our view of Otari Wilton’s Bush was relatively clear but for the walls of fog creeping around the end of the hill and making their way towards us, but always evaporating before they reached us. Many people living in the cloud would stay at home for the day, believing it to be dreary and depressing weather, but I find walking through this subtle kind of environment fascinating.

    Stacey and I went for a walk down into the central city, 20-50 minutes away depending on urgency, and the view over the harbour was iconic of these kinds of days. Much of the mist would have evaporated by the time we saw it at 11.30am, but with the Orongorongas highlighted by their contrast in the background behind the city and the harbour as they lead towards the southern extent of the Tararuas, it’s a good sight all the same.

    3620901379_c6bc326fc5_m-1476062

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  • It’s only a magnet with a circle attached

    I bought myself a new compass yesterday, which was another Silva Field 7 baseplate compass, identical to the one that I lost last October. It’s the most basic Silva compass on the market. It’s often marketed as being “ideal for youth and beginners”. For me it seems to do the job perfectly well and while I’m not a navigation supremo, I’ve been working on it for a while now and I’ve not yet had any issues with having only the basic features. I guess they market it that way to drive people towards the more expensive parts of their range.

    For several months I’ve been using a baseplate Coleman compass that I found at Rebel Sport for a quarter of the price, and for me at least it works just as well as the Silva Field 7. It’s slightly larger though, if only because it includes extra features like a magnifier that I never use, and ultimately that’s why I decided to replace it. It’s only after I’d been using a smaller Field 7 compass for a while that I noticed the Coleman compass was actually quite heavy, and that’s why I bought myself another Field 7.

    It’s a shame they’re priced at about $35 for something so basic, which I think is more of a branding thing than anything else. If I could get a cheap un-branded compass of similar specifications then I would, but they’re hard to find on short notice. I suppose that all you really need is a magnetically sensitive needle inside a nicely divided circle. It probably helps some people to have a few features like a better grips on the dial thingee and a magnifier for maps (which I’ve personally never used), but I’ve yet to see anyone using something like a typically expensive sighting compass for tramping navigation in New Zealand. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the circles I associate with. They’re in the shops a lot so they must sell, and I’m quite interested to know what sorts of activities people use them for.

  • Buying packs and buying spinach

    Wow — the Tararuas have had three weekends of fantastic weather in a row, and I haven’t been there for any of them. I guess I did at least get out to the Ruahines a week ago, though. This Saturday and Sunday I stayed at home, however.

    For a while now, I’ve been keeping an eye out for a new pack to replace my disintegrating Macpac Glissade. It’s not really disintegrating, but I’ve patched it up with tape in a couple of places despite it only being a couple of years old. The major problem I’ve been having is that if and when I replace it, I want to make sure I’m getting something that I really want, and honestly there’s not a lot of selection in Wellington retailers right now as far as packs go. Just about everything is the same basic design, with pockets and openings all over the place. This is unfortunate because in essence I’m looking for a simple, relatively light single-access-point tramping pack without lots of zippers (which add weight unnecessarily) and without lots of bits hanging off it (which add more weight, and get caught on things).

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  • Flashy hydration systems

    Michelle recently posted thoughts about her Platypus hydration system, which inspired me to write something about my own experiences. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a while, but hadn’t really formulated it in my head until now.

    In case you didn’t know, a hydration bladder is a water-holding bladder with a hose attached. They typically sit in a pack that you’re wearing, and the attached hose makes it easy to keep sipping water on an ongoing basis without having to stop and unpack a water bottle. In this day and age, a variety of backpacks are designed for use with hydration bladders, and often have a small gap through which a hose can be fed. Platypus is the brand-name for a well known line of hydration bladder products put out by a holding company called Cascade Designs, which also does a bunch of other well known outdoor brands like MSR and Therm-a-Rest. Their main competition in the trendy-looking shiny-hydration-bladder industry, at least in New Zealand, seems to come from CamelBak, which makes a range of backpacks designed to hold hydration systems, but will also sell the plastic bladders individually.

    A plethora of more generic brands also exist, which are typically much cheaper and probably at least as good. Thanks to the name recognition, however, “Platypus” and “CamelBak” are often used as generic names, at least in the circles where I associate, to simply mean “some kind of water hydration system that isn’t a cheap and nasty plastic bottle”. I discovered this when I noticed that many people were referring to my Platypus as a Camelbak without really caring that it wasn’t. Ironically now that I have a Camelbak, I’ve already heard at least two people refer to it as a Platypus, and nobody has yet called it a Camelbak. They’re basically all water bladders, and for some reason not many people seem to like boasting that they’re drinking out of their bladder. Maybe this is why there’s a preference for using the brand names.

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  • I really hope I’m warmer from now on

    I’ve spent the odd night over the past winter feeling rather cold. The most “interesting” of these was that episode in the wood-shed between 3am and 6am on a Saturday morning. The absence of sleep before 3am and after 6am probably didn’t help, but I suppose I’d hoped that it would have been warmer during those 3 hours. I probably managed about an hour in total, which made for a very long and cranky Saturday of walking.

    This event, and some other recent events, have convinced me that maybe it’s time to fork out some cash and replace the Kathmandu PaceSetter bag that I’ve mostly used recently. I think some people would see the words “Kathmandu” and “Sleeping Bag” in the same sentence (or any gear for that matter), and immediately think that it’s a horrible product. I don’t want to criticise it too much if I can help it, because it’s served me pretty well. At this point I still plan to use it during summer because it’s adequate and probably better suited. It’s usually okay in huts and under an open fly at the low-ish altitudes where I’ve used it, but I can vouch from my own experience that for a sleeping bag that was marketed near the top of the Kathmandu range, I still thought it was… well… flimsy and unreliable, and sometimes cold, at least when it was exposed to places that weren’t under much other shelter.

    Consequently, and just in time for mid-Spring (I’m brilliant at timing), I’m now the proud but uncertain owner of a new Macpac Sanctuary 700XP sleeping bag, which I hope will turn out to be more appropriate for some of the winter-like things I want to do in the future. It’s not the warmest bag in the range, but when looking at the relative weights and the loft and down fill, it already seems much warmer than what I already have and without being any heavier.
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  • And now I need a new one

    That could have gone better. My compass has just been claimed by the Ruahine Range during an “unscheduled” pack-floating incident in the Oroua River near Iron Gates Hut. I think it must have floated out of my pocket while I was concentrating on other things which, to be perfectly honest, seemed more important at the time. In hindsight I still think they were, and my robust little navigational instrument was a necessary price to pay. I guess it says something for making sure that everything’s tied down. It’s probably most of the way out to sea by now.

    It was a Silva Field 7, which is a very basic baseplate compass and it does the job perfectly. They retail for about $30 so it’s no great financial loss. It’s still a bit of a downer, though, since I make an effort not to leave junk lying around in the wilderness.

    Other than that, it was a worth-while experience. I’ll write something and post photographs of the trip in coming days. Meanwhile you could read Robb’s account of his solo trip in the same area a few days beforehand.

    Update, 27-10-2008: It seems I wrote the account of the whole trip faster than I thought.