Rob and Nathan on Derwentwater

That entire holiday was not planned and because of it I saw things I just would have never done otherwise. “oh look, a train, let’s get on it” and then we ended up on the Swiss border in some tiny little village outpost near a hydroelectric power station. Fantastic!

I think the key to an adventure is to always remember the five P’s. Proper Planning Prevents Pleasurable Pastimes. 

So, when making plans for the 2008 August bank holiday it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise that when I suggested a camping trip, it would not be as imagined by my co adventurists.

I’d invited a few people from work, three of whom had NEVER been camping before. I found that hard to believe, but hey, that’s London for you. They were about to have the best introduction to a night under canvass that I could muster…

The English Lake District is a wonderful place. In summer the lakes glisten and the picturesque towns are buzzing with tourists, the mountains full of out of breath dads who thought the hill “didn’t look that big from the car”, and the pubs are delivering pints of crisp Coniston Bluebird to the overcrowded beer gardens. The winter sees even more beauty, with snow capped peaks and crunchy, slightly less crowded footpaths.

If I was going to be taking some countryside virgins on a camping trip, I think there’s no better place I could have done it than the lakes. So that was the corner of the country sorted. Now for a more accurate destination.

At the top end of the Lake District, situated in the shadow the epic looking Blencathra, is Keswick (pronounced Kezick, for anybody not used to our fickle language), a veritable tourist hub and probably the last such place before you get to Scotland. Keswick is nice enough in itself but just beyond it, heading towards the stunning, almost alpine looking Borrowdale, is Derwentwater.

Derwentwater is one of the deepest lakes in the Lake District, I think second only to Wastwater, and it is liberally populated with small islands, the largest of which is called St Herbert’s. The island is mostly free from human interference, and the only way out there is by sitting on or in something that floats. To be specific, sitting on or in something that floats for about 2Km across the second deepest lake in the Lake District. Yes, I think I’d got the right destination in order for our unsuspecting campers.

Inflating the boat

We picked the car up from Europcar in Victoria after leaving work an hour early on the Friday, then proceeded to drive across London to my house in Wapping. I was moving out to begin my life on Kudu the following weekend, and since my parents live on the way to the lakes, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and put a load of my stuff in “storage” in their shed.

Myself and Parminder Matharu had picked up the first car, since we needed two to carry the people and luggage. We filled it with speakers, clothes and books from my old bedroom, and when Jeff and cronies arrived in the second, much better looking car (not to be outdone he got a sport upgrade I think), and we set off Northbound.

After getting lost around North East London for a while, we finally managed to break lose of the remarkably poor road signs in the city and found ourselves on the motorway. We settled in for the ride and a few hours later rolled up at my parents’ house in Lancashire.

Rob, who had traveled up to his parents’ by train the day before, had borrowed his dad’s work van and brought along two kayaks. His timing was pretty much spot on and he arrived from Formby within minutes of our two car convoy.

We spent the night playing poker and having a couple of drinks, and me seeing my dad almost lose my inheritance to Jeff, who turned out to be quite the Poker King!

The next morning saw an early start as my wonderful mother cooked us all a full English breakfast before we packed all the gear into Robs’ dad’s van and jumped back on the motorway. Myself, Judy, and Rob in the beast of a white van, and Jeff, Daniele Sangalli, Brigita and Parminder in their Vectra behind. If there’s one thing you can rely on it’s that a white van on a mission is faster than any other car on the road, including hire cars, which come a close second in the reckless driving stakes.

And so the Wild Camp begins

We arrived at Derwentwater just before midday and set about inflating the Seago, which was a boat I’d bought the week before, especially for this trip. As it happens it was a total waste of money since it was too big to fit on my yacht, Kudu,  and so I sold it a few weeks later.

Now, I think at this point it’s worth mentioning the outfit that our virgin camp team brought along with them. Daniele, being a very fashion conscious individual from Milan, decided that a travel bag with wheels and extendable handle was essential for wild camping on a remote island. In the pocket of said bag was an umbrella.

“Dan, why have you got an umbrella?” I inquired.

with a surprised gasp came the reply, “but what if it rains?”

It was at that point that I knew Dan was in for an unpleasant weekend.

Parminder was busy running around with his camera taking snaps – he’s very talented behind a lens actually – and the rest of the team where shipping supplies over from the van and car to the beach where I was busy on the foot pump.

Once inflated, I attached the outboard, which actually belong to my little yacht, Kudu, and then took the inflatable and engine out for a quick test run. I had never had the engine running but was assured by the guy I bought the yacht off that it was sound, although very old. I rowed the boat, now christened ‘Mabel’ by order of Judy, out into the deeper water away from the pebble beach and lowed the outboard shaft into the water.

I didn’t expect it to start first time, but I did expect it to start, and as I sat there pulling on the cord like a madman, drifting around in the breeze with onlookers on the shore in amusement, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t want to. Perhaps two years without use had gotten the better of it. I persisted nevertheless, and after about the 50th yank on the pull cord, it burst into life. I gave it a few seconds to ‘bed in’ and then popped it in gear, carefully working the throttle to keep the reluctant engine going as I motored in circles. Once I was happy it was warm enough, and now running smoothly, I opened up the throttle and the little Seago TSR 290 jumped up on to the plane and charged across the lake with its passenger grinning from ear to ear.

I stopped messing about in the boat and turned to head back to shore where my nervous passengers stood, now appreciating the distance between them and our destination island in the distance.

We had to make a few trips since we couldn’t fit all our kit and people in the boat, although Rob and Jeff were going to kayak across, it was still going to take 3 journeys – six for me, the captain of the ferry.

First up on the pleasure cruise was Judy. We had pretty much filled the boat with gear, but to save the number of trips, and because Judy is only little, I got her to hop on too. It wasn’t at all down to me fancying her a bit. Honest

We headed across slowly since with all the weight the 8hp Suzuki just couldn’t get the boat planing, and any attempt to open the throttle too much resulted in a bow wave that flooded the boat, and got my nervous passenger soaked. This was an accident, I promise.

I unloaded and headed back for the next cargo. By my 6th and final trip across the lake I was glad it was over. The first couple of crossings had been exciting, but by now I knew that my already delivered passengers were busy on the island getting a fire going and helping themselves to the copious amount of booze we felt compelled to bring with us. Even Jeff and Rob in the kayaks had made it across by now.

The camp on St Herberts Island, Derwentwater.

It wasn’t long before we had a fire built and were preparing food.

Actually, while I’m here I’m going to impose a lesson. Every time I visit the island I take a supply of firewood with me, and this trip was no different. Nothing gets on my tits more than inconsiderate oafs stomping around ripping up tree’s and removing large logs from the woodland floor. Stuff lives in it, and if everybody who visited the island behaved like that, it would soon be a desolate mess. If you follow in our footsteps and head out there, please remember to leave the place exactly as you found it.

So, there we were, fire going, camp established. Good company, in fact the best, and good drink courtesy or Brigita’s Austrian heritage. All we were missing was a good feed, and I had just the thing; a whole joint of pork.

The first idea was to ram a spit through it, but we later decided that this was quite hard to make a sturdy spit out of the avilable material and it would also take absolutely ages to cook a slab of meat that size, so we rolled on to plan B. Cut the joint up into smaller pieces, wrap it in aluminium foil and throw on the fire.

Plan A, the spit roast, failed.

Plan B worked perfectly. It was genuinely the best chunk of pork I’d ever eaten. Cooked to perfection, but whether that was through luck or culinary skill I’m not sure. It was delicious, and unadulterated by condiments or sides. We simply had a large chunk of tender pork in a bread roll.

That evening, as the booze flowed, I began to do my usual trick of dancing like a moron. My old trick used to be getting naked, but I seem to – thankfully – have grown out of that and instead adopted some bizarre gyrational maneuver. In dancing terms it’s quite uncoordinated, but in physics terms I think my gravity defying boogie is probably quite impressive.

I was in the midst of said flailing, quite late on in to the night when I lost my balance and fell towards the fire. Despite being pissed I was quite sure that landing face first in the approaching furnace would smart a little. I’m not quite sure how but I managed to shift my weight, and direct my fall onto Jeff and Parm who were relaxing on the rug we’d taken.

I landed on them with a crunch. I was thankful they weren’t fire and they were thankful I’m of a fairly slender build. Needless to say the gyrating stopped after this little sobering incident!

My early on in the evening, looking and feeling quite content with my camp fire and beer.

Judy didn’t have a tent, so I kindly lent her mine for the weekend – It’s a Vaude Hogan by the way, and the best all round tent I’ve ever had. Now, being somewhat inebriated and fancying my chances, I decided to crawl into my tent, expecting Judy to follow suit at some point, where upon I’d impress her with my worldly knowledge and we would make sweet love till the sun rose. This schnapps fueled, although impressively cunning plan (I’m sure you’ll agree), was foiled as Rob, being as ever a gentleman, informed me that I was in Judy’s space and should move to his tent.

I let out a moody sigh and conceded to a night under canvass in the company of my default tent partner, and somebody I’d spent many nights up mountains and even in snow holes with. Rob is a good guy, but it put a rather disturbing spin on my sweet love till sunrise plan.

The sun climbed gently above the hills at the end of the lake, and with it began our hangovers.  Although the fire had been seemingly extinguished with water the night before, and the night had brought rain, it was impressively still smoldering under the ash. A few pieces of fresh firewood later and a bit of lung work and we had a fresh morning fire, ripe for making tea and cooking porridge, which we did.

Photo by Parminder Matharu, used totally without permission in a cheeky way.

With breakfast out of the way, we turned to some camp maintenance.
As I’ve already mentioned, the night in all it’s kindness brought with it a decent downpour, which collected upon the top of our tarpaulin that was covering the majority of the camp. This had become too heavy for the supporting cord to retain and it snapped, depositing a few gallons of water on to the ground next to Dan and Parm’s single skin bargain basement tent. Dan was not having a good introduction to camping since now, not only was he wet, but ALL of his spare clothes were too. Parminder was in a similar state, although is primary focus was on making sure his camera equipment was dry;  it was.

I’ve not been kayaking since I was about 9 years old when a Navy friend of my Dad took me and his kids out onto Coniston… actually, it was right in the spot where a decade or so later they would find a body. Nice! Anyway, since I had not done it for years, and Rob had two with him, I took one out for a spin. After struggling into the kag and spray deck, and listening to a quick lesson about how to get out if I roll, I pushed off and went for a paddle around the island. Those things aren’t very stable, but I managed to stay upright even in the choppier water further away from land.

Yours truly having a play on one of Rob's Kayaks.

Since we’d consumed almost all of our alcohol cache the night before, and the firewood was getting quite low on supply too, we decided to venture out to replenish the camp stock. Rob and me set out in the inflatable and, not being burdened with the weight of 4 people, skimmed across the water to the marina at the Keswick end of Derwentwater. They sold neither booze nor wood, but did tell us that there was an supermarket in Keswick that we could get to via a jetty on the other side of the lake. We were also warned not to go too close to the shore on the way over since there is a hidden shale bank.

We got back in to the boat, and slowly motored out of the marina until we got into open water, where I slammed the throttle again, being sure to avoid the peril of the shale bank guarded shore. What the women didn’t tell us is that the shale bank was actually a considerably large spit of land into the lake, and as we whooshed across to the other side of the Derwentwater, I noticed a change in the texture of the water. It took me a split second to realise this was the bottom, but once I did I immediately killed the throttle and reached for the gear lever to put it in neutral, but it was too late. There were a couple of scraping noises followed immediately by a horrible bang as the shaft of the outboard flew upwards out of the water. I quickly killed the engine and winced as I looked at the prop, expecting to find a mangled chunk of metal.
Thankfully, there was no damage at all. The shale must have been loose enough to let the prop slice through it, and the force of the impact was taken by the fin at the bottom of the shaft. We were lucky, so after rowing into deeper water, we continued very slowly towards the jetty under power.

After tying the boat up we began the walk into town. The supermarket had everything we needed, from booze to fire blocks and we were soon heading back to the boat, fully laden with supplies. Although slightly heavier, the Seago just about managed to plane and we were soon back at camp, greeted by bored, alcohol starved campers. Jeff had prepared gnocci while we were away, and although they’d eaten theirs, they’d kindly left some in the pot for me and Rob. Jeff, I might add, is a fantastic chef. He really is a bit of a creative genius in the kitchen and this ability was thankfully brought with him for the duration of the camping trip. I haven’t eaten as well as I did that weekend ever since!

Right, well, I think that’s a good opportunity to bring this rather long blog post to a close. A lot more happened that weekend, including some real bush craft cooking with willow bark and fresh trout, but I’ll perhaps cover that another time. The journey back across the lake was slightly more eventful since the weather had changed for the worse and was both very windy and chucking it down. Dan was again not happy. In fact, on the last night out there he let out a shriek from his tent “oh god, 11 hours to go!”.  I’m not sure he’ll come again :p

Jeff 'The Chef' Johnston