In this year of unprecedented events, it doesn’t seem that surprising anymore that new catastrophes keep coming. Fire season in California seems worse every year. with hotter temperatures and bigger more destructive wildfires. Air quality is epically bad and the worse it has ever been. In recent weeks, dozens of wildfires have ignited across the state, threatening to burn rural and suburban communities blanketing cities in a smoggy red haze. Last week, Marks and Phoebe’s college roommates house in Talent, Oregon burned completely to the ground. A Go Fund Me account was established to help them rebuild.
Two weeks ago, I put on the n95 and fished the forebay with Dave Bearden. We found some fish in the channel fishing inside the weedline in the shallows. After locating them with topwater plugs, we would fish clousers and catch about a half dozen fish before searching for more. By noon it was 110 degrees and we called it a day. On the drive home, I had a trailer tire failure and thanks to Dave, we managed to install our spare and make back to Morgan Hill. I ended up ordering parts to rebuild the fender, lights and oil hub. That pretty much delayed fishing out of the crestliner for a couple weeks.
I had planned to be in Alaska fishing the Aleutian Islands this last week but the trip got cancelled so I decided to plan a camping trip for Gina and I to look for some trout. I ended up joining Wilderness Unlimited again after calling around Burney for a pay RV campsites and finding out there has been a huge demand for camping during the Covid restrictions. It seems there has been a surge in RV sales and everyone has been trying to “get out of Dodge” making it almost impossible to make reservations at all the popular public campgrounds. Wilderness Unlimited has some uncrowded private campsites around some great fly fishing in Northern California and Oregon. I’m sure we will use it in our retirement years more than when we did with the kids years ago and rejoining was painless.
We had a week at Bidwell Ponds reserved and we prepared the Lance Trailer for a week of Boondocking. I upgraded the Trailer with two Ecoflow Delta Power Units , solar panels and a Zero Breeze low power Air Conditioner. A week off grid takes real effort if you take your wife – Glamping or no camping. Mark and Pheobe decided to join us as well as our guests at Bidwell for a couple days as well. It was going to be a great week of trout fishing until we woke up in the Nuclear Winter the day before we were leaving. I have never seen brown fog like that before. We checked the air quality prediction for the Burney area and they were in the high 300s. In a phenomenon never before seen at such a scale, the 28 major California fires were creating their own weather leaving the meteorologists clueless. Normally healthy AIQ is less than 50. San Jose was over 100 and Burney was over 300.
Gina was sad that we missed out on the opportunity to camp with Mark and Phoebe. She hopped on the internet hoping to find some cancelled beach camping opportunities and managed to score three days at Half Moon Bay. Glamping with Mark and Phoebe was on again. Actually it was perfect. Half Moon Bay had electrical hookups and we put one of our Molekule filtration units in the camper running all the time. There was surf fishing and golf nearby as well as restaurants and fish markets open to the public for outside dinning. The AIQ at the coastline is always better and it would likely be the best place to weather the fallout. Plus we were less than an hour from home in case we needed to evacuate quickly.
The camping trip was a huge success. Mark and I invented competitions at the driving, putting and chipping range. The Ocean View Driving range which is literally a 5 minute walk from the campsite is rustic but not crowded – ten bucks for 100 balls (bring cash). The surf was pretty flat for the week and I had a hard time finding the holes with schools of fish. I ended up only catching a couple small perch – not enough to eat. Just as well, we ended up shopping for lobsters and oysters at the fish market and feasted on Sous Vide tri tip and lobsters for dinner one night. We had some great campfires and watched a little football on opening day of the NFL while the girls drove to town and shopped.
Every time we camp in the trailer, I discover a list of improvements to make. On this trip, we lost the 12 volt converter resulting in the complete draining of the battery while plugged in. Thank god the camp host had a battery charger I could borrow plus I did bring an extra battery just in case this happened. Turns out changing the converter out is not that hard and I ordered the part on amazon. Also, I discovered that the TOGO unit I had bought a couple years ago stopped subscribing unlimited bandwidth for $300 a year. That’s pretty unfair since the only reason I bought it was for the plan. I think the best thing now is to buy a 5g /4g cell phone amp on a mast. I pretty much figured out that I can stream 1080P movies to our RV Flatscreen from my phone and as long as I can get a 4g data stream, I can watch live tv anywhere. Gina and I prefer binge watching movies and Tv series and I can store weeks of movies and TV on my Iphone. I like using the AV Player app on my phone for camping video media. With this program you dont have to convert video to a specific format and it is very configurable with lots of control for output. You can easily delete media after viewing. Its a media server in your pocket.
Gina somehow got on at last minute. I think people were cancelling because of air quality. We actually got 22 Sunday and Monday-Wed 19. Gina and think 19 is the best site.
Looks like you got site 17 that’s a good one and so last minute. Looks like a fun time.
Gina somehow got on at last minute. I think people were cancelling because of air quality. We actually got 22 Sunday and Monday-Wed 19. Gina and think 19 is the best site.