Camping On Largess Pond

Twice a year, my family and I put aside five days to go camping on Largess Pond. We have made a family pact, come rain, hail or shine, nothing interferes with these two family camping trips. No excuses whatsoever.

This year we have agreed to a long weekend in March and a second long weekend in October. The other stipulation for these family trip is that we live harmoniously in the wild. Therefore there will be no tents, chairs, BBQ, esky etc etc. You get the idea.

My family consists of Grandpa Joe, Dad, Mum, my older sister Sam and myself, Charlie. Yes I’m well aware that Mum and Dad had two girls snd gave them both male names. We don’t like it anymore than you do.

Camping trip number one is commencing tomorrow morning. We will be leaving home at 5am for the two hour drive to Largess Pond. Early start to ensure that we have camp set up before nightfall.

It’s a pleasant morning, when we rise out of bed, on the day we are to set off. Everyone is keen and excited, breakfast is done and dusted early, as we want to get on the road.

The sun is slowly rising as we leave our driveway in our family SUV. The weather forecast announces it’s going to be a moderate summer day. Temperature high of 32 degrees and an expected low of 18 degrees. Nice.

We arrive at the pond at 7:10am and surprisingly we seem to have the lake to ourselves. Be heaven if we do so for the entire five days.

As we pile out of the car, we all set off to gather whatever we can find to help us make camp comfortable. I collect Y shaped tree limbs and long straight tree branches. These will be used as bed frames. How you may ask?

The bottom leg of the Y is buried in the ground, one each end. Smaller straight branches will be placed at an angle with one end sitting in the V section of the Y and the other end jammed tightly into the ground. These angled branches will now hold the two long branches that become the sides of the bed.

I head off to find some vine rope from the vines that climb the local trees. This vine rope, will be weaved back and forth between the two long side branches, to form a mattress of sort.

There, I have successfully set up five beds for the family.

While this was my task, Grandpa Joe collected enough kindling for the fire for five days. Sam collected the larger wood to feed to the fire.

Mum scouted for herbs, mushrooms, truffles and edible berries. She also was our best bow woman and she managed to bring down a couple of rabbits.

Lastly Dad was our magic fisherman. He’s been known to practically whisper the fish and yabbies straight out of the pond.

And there you have it. We are set for the next five days. We have beds, weather is warm enough we don’t need bed coverings, fire, kindling and firewood, meat, fish, berries, herbs, mushrooms and water from the pond for drinking.

The next four days, as it had taken all day on the first day to set up camp, are spent swimming, sun bathing, reading, sleeping, telling stories around the camp fire and generally having fun.

At the end, no one wanted to head home, but home we went.

Life carried on as normal. Hectic and fast paced, everyone’s stress slowly building until finally October arrived.

Tomorrow is the day we head off camping.

We woke the next morning and to our astonishment it was unusually cold and crisp. Not what was forecast as we’d been expecting a pleasant spring day.

As we were finishing up breakfast, we looked outside to see a freak hailstorm had found us. Hail the size of golf balls and the temperature had dropped even lower. Checked the outside temperature to find it was only 2 degrees. Very unusual.

However, our family pact made it so we would still head off to Largess Pond. It took an extra hour to travel due to the weather but finally we arrived.

We climbed out of the car to the most extraordinary sight. The landscape was beautiful and pristine clean and the pond was totally frozen over. It all looked extremely beautiful but it was going to put our survival preparation to the rest.

Where to start? We’d never seen the pond frozen before so we were all a little unsure.

Dad went down to the pond to check it out and come back to say it was frozen solid. He dug out a pick axe from the back of the car and advised we were going to build an igloo, big enough for us all to sleep, out on the pond.

I took the pick axe down to the pond and started chipping out some ice bricks. Dad carried the bricks to, what he believed, was the perfect spot.

Mum did her normal scouting for fresh food, Sam and Grandpa Joe started collecting wood for the fire. Dad and I continued tirelessly to build the igloo.

As the igloo took a lot longer to build than just having to build our branch beds, everyone had finished their chores before Dad and I.

Dad asked Mum to head out with her bow to find meat if possible and asked Sam to start fishing in the area of the pond that we’d removed the ice for igloo bricks. Dad also showed Sam that on the higher banks of the pond, too high for the ice to reach, were yabbie holes where she’d be able to scoop yabbies out with a stick.

Dad took over on the pick axe then and I placed the bricks he cut. All we needed now were some smaller ice bricks for the fire chimney. Another hour and the igloo was done.

Mum was lucky and had scouted out three rabbits, Sam had been successful with both fish and yabbies and we had warm furs in the car that had been made from the rabbit skins of Mum’s previous kills.

Camp was all set and we’d be comfortable and happy for the next four days.

Our pact, to go camping, rain, hail or shine was still fully intact and we were all very proud of ourselves and each other.

Happy camping.

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