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Three Essential Camping Safety Tips for Families
Depending on just how daring you are, your camping trip with your family might or might not fraught with potential hazards. These hazards don’t necessarily refer to the minor inconveniences that come with bug bites or sleeping on a harder surface – instead, the more recklessly you camp, the more you expose your family to real danger. That’s why you’ll want to make sure you camp the right way from the first time on. These three camping safety tips will help you be prepared for camping hazards, hopefully leading to a safe and enjoyable camping trip for you and yours.
- Tip #1: Set clear rules for the campfire.
- One of the most obvious hazards involved with campfires. If you have smaller children who are in the stage of their life when their legspeed far exceeds their common sense and they feel like they have to explore, you’ll have to make it explicitly clear that the fire pit is not the place to explore. The campfire serves both practical and aesthetic purposes -it doesn’t need to be played with.
Once you’ve established clear boundaries for your children, give them viable alternatives to enjoy when it’s time to light the fire. Toys, stories, and even a portable video game can help them keep their mind occupied – and away from the fire. Remember to be acutely aware of where your children are once you light the fire.
- Tip #2: Scout out water yourself first.
If you’re near a new lake, pond, or river and aren’t exactly sure about issues like water depth, temperature, or potential hazards like animals or insects, you’ll want to take a dip yourself to make sure that everything will work well for your children. In destinations with higher traffic, this won’t typically be an issue. If you’re a little further out into the American frontier, however, you’ll want to make sure to act as the scout for your family.
- Tip #3: Make sure your children are aware of the dangers of provoking animals.
Even seemingly harmless creatures might carry diseases, so it’s important to make sure your children know how to react when they come across an animal. Larger mammals like raccoons can be potentially deadly – don’t just leave these situations to nature. Even if animals are generally scared away when they detect human activity, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t let your children know about animals. Don’t send them into situations where they might confront a dangerous animal.
Photo Credits: Joi
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How to Stay Safe During Your Camping Trip
Camping can be a dangerous undertaking because it requires you to spend an extended time in the great outdoors. If you’re planning to take your children camping with you, then you need to spend extra time examining certain precautions that you need to take. What should you worry about when you’re about ready to go, though? This article will give you a few common concerns and what you should do to prepare for them.
Watch the Weather
Being outdoors, it’s very important that you pay very close attention to the forecast when you’re going camping. If you’re going in the winter months it can be extremely dangerous if you camp in the midst of a snowstorm because you could easily run out of food and have no way of getting back to civilization. Be sure to watch the weather reports and if you’re already at your campsite you can always ask any rangers or other campers you see what the forecast looks like.
Bring the Right Supplies
Brining supplies with you can help you feel much safer during your trip as it offers you a backup and can be used anytime an unexpected problem occurs. Common supplies include: bug spray, extra food, and medications. It’s extremely important that you bring any medication that a family or friend needs in case they have any issue during the trip. You should also bring a first aid kit as it’s very easy to be injured by falling or possibly by an animal in an extended visit.
Plan Ahead
Perhaps the best thing you can do before going on your camping trip is planning ahead. Plan things like where you’re going to camp and for how long you’re going to stay. This planning should include both of the previous items, watching the weather and considering the essential supplies. It’s important that you think of any possible problem that can occur while you’re camping and be ready to address it accordingly.
Use Common Sense
Not using common sense is probably the cause of most problems that occur in the woods. Don’t attempt to do anything that could be potentially fatal, and make sure you follow basic camping guidelines such as leaving food out near or inside of the tents. With a little common sense it should be easy for you to avoid any problems that you could experience.
If you follow the above advice it should be easy for you to plan a fun and safe camping trip for you and your family.
Photo Credits: Omer Simkha
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Five Steps for Maintaining a Safe Campfire
It’s not until you see how quickly a fire can spread that you really start to respect the power that fire can have. When a fire grows, it becomes harder to approach it due to the heat. The best way to avoid campfire mishaps is simple: prevention. Preventing any problems from campfires will help you to avoid having to call in the fire department. Here are five steps for maintaining a safe campfire.
Step #1: Dig a proper fire pit. There’s a reason the fire pit is so popular – it works. Digging a fire pit is like installing your own stove in the woods. If you dig a fire pit, you are able to separate the fire from other areas, not to mention keeping the fire at a lower level, which means that you’ll be able to use items to cook over the fire more easily. Make sure that you leave enough room for a little bit of air to flow through the area.
Step #2: Separate the fire pit from regular ground using rocks. Rocks don’t exactly burst out in flames, so they help prevent the flames in your fire from spreading to dry brush around the fire pit area. It also creates a visible barrier that unmistakeably tells other people to avoid that one particular area. Try to wrap the fire area tightly to properly seal it off.Step #3: Don’t add too much wood at once. If you’ve ever been near a fire that has a lot of dry wood to consume, you’ve seen exactly how fast that kind of fire can expand. If you add firewood that expands the fire, it’s common sense that the fire will grow. Sure, there’s a possibility that this will burn down safe and sound later on, but prevention is all about avoiding those dangerous risks.
Step #4: Don’t feed the wood fuel that is bigger than the fire pit. The fire pit is a certain size for a reason. You can build a large fire if you want, but it has to be controlled. If you add large wooden objects that exceed the size fire pit, you’ll see how quickly the original fire pit becomes moot. Don’t do that. Instead, make sure your fire is contained in the area of the fire pit, with a little bit of room in the pit to spare.
Step #5: Keep effective fire-stoppers handy. It’s a good idea to keep a bucket of water and other means of stopping the fire handy, even if you don’t think the fire will get out of control. In case it does, you’ll want to be prepared. Make sure you’re aware of the best ways to put out a fire, and remember that fires need air to survive.
Photo Credits: rudis
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Five Boating Safety Tips for the Novice Fisherman
In case you haven’t noticed, driving a boat along the water isn’t exactly like driving a car. When you’re out on a boat, things like weight and balance become more sensitive. If you want to make sure that you have a safe and happy boating experience on your next fishing jaunt on the lake, it’s important to keep in mind some basic rules of safety and caution. Here are five tips for boating safety.
Tip #1: Follow the local laws and ordinances.
Some laws – like having enough life preserver jackets in the boat for everyone on board – are actually common sense ideas that you should enforce upon yourself anyway. Make sure you keep enough life jackets on board for everyone, and in general, be sure to follow the laws of the lake, including the wake hours.
Tip #2: When steering a boat, make small corrections when you can.
Steering a boat can feel like steering a car in slow motion – once you steer the engine, there is a delay before the turn really seems to take effect. It will be important to make small corrections when you’re steering a boat, unless of course there’s immediate danger and you need to turn right away. Try to keep your motions smooth so that they don’t upset the balance of the boat.
Tip #3: Make sure everything is secure before you accelerate.
On faster boats, this is especially a consideration. Make sure everyone is sitting down and prepared for an acceleration before you hit that throttle. You don’t want equipment – or worse, people – to go flying overboard because you suddenly turned up the engines. Unless there’s immediate danger, try not to accelerate or break all at once.
Tip #4: Make sure everything is off when you start fishing.
Having your engine off when you start fishing will help prevent a loose child on the boat from pushing the wrong button and catching everyone off-guard. Make sure everything is off and secure once you start fishing so that you can concentrate on the fishing itself.
Tip #5: Be mindful of other boats.
Sometimes when you’ve been out on the lake long enough, it can feel like you have the lake all to yourself. But it will still be important to be mindful of other boats so that you don’t find yourself getting too close to them.
Photo Credits: DeusXFlorida
