A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.

There are a few things to consider when planning your food.

Supply Points

The first real thing to do is to find out where possible supply points are and then to work out the distances and times required to get between these.

When kayaking the Murray, no special planning is needed for food. Distance information is fairly easily obtainable and you just need to look up the towns online to find out if they have any stores. It doesn't take too much research to note that you can get away with buying fresh food as you pass by the various towns along the way and to take some canned food for the couple of longer stretches. The longest stretch of 265 km would only require a maximum of a weeks food supply by most paddlers.

When kayaking the Culgoa, this requires much more careful planning. The first step was to accurately work out the distances, which I did using Google Maps measurement tool. 600 km with the likelihood of a town halfway didn't seem too bad until I tried getting confirmation that the store was still running. After a couple hours chasing people on the phone, I found out that it had closed a couple of years ago. So food drop or a 600 km stretch. A conservative estimate of 50 km a day would point to a 12 day run, 14 days with a couple of rest days. However, if there were bad log jams or fence crossings to tackle on a regular basis, that could easily cut down on my speed. Worse case times could be closer to 25 km per day. Since the river was in flood conditions, I backed myself to make 30 km days and packed three weeks worth of food. I easily made it in under two weeks paddling but I could easily see how a few misturns in the flooded plains or slightly lower water conditions could have created delays that would have pushed my food supplies. As an aside, many shop owners get very perplexed when you ring them up to see if they are open!

Playing with the idea of the Coopers, this does not have any major stores along the entire length other than at Longreach where there is an IGA and Foodworks. That is ~300 km from Torren Creek Township. From Longreach it is over 800 km to Innamincka where there is a pub and then nearly another 700 km to get to the usually dry Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre). I would tackle this with a single food drop at Innamincka and be taking at least a month's food for each leg. This is assuming a good flow along the entire river and a pickup from the mouth of the creek.

You can use the distance tables on this site for some of the rivers like the Murray River to work out your food requirements between various towns. Just tap or hover over each table cell to see the estimated number of days for most paddling paces.

Food drops

There are three main ways to handle food drops:

Support Crew

Get a friend or family member to drop this off directly. Any accessible location that they can dive to will become a supply point! Some trips have one or more people paddling and another following along by road. On many days, the paddler wouldn't even need to carry supplies other than lunch and some water.

Local Businesses

Don't be afraid to ask if it is ok to do a food drop at places. Many hotels, hostels and camping grounds are often happy to do this. About 75% of the places that I have asked have been willing to look after a couple bags of food for no charge. I try to stay the night or get a meal to return the favour when dropping the food off or when I pick it up. Along more remote stretches you may have to try local landowners / stations.

I haven't personally tried this, but you could potentially send food to pick up at a later time. Most small towns still have a AUSPost shop / general store. I have even had a couple businesses in remote areas offer to do a food shop on your behalf if you wire them a shopping list and some cash!

Food Stashes

Food Barrels are the last way I know that is commonly used. Tough plastic barrels are buried or stashed close to the river or track. It is vital that these will be strong enough to handle the local wildlife. In Australia that would be foxes and dingoes, in North America that would require bear-proof containers in some places (better to consider option two). And don't forget mice, if there are small openings or small rubber seals, they will easily be able to get into the container.

This would usually be done in conjunction with a local farmer or landowner, firstly to ensure they do not take it if they do find it and that you can offer the empty container to the farmer for free afterwards if you can't make it back to pick it up. Most will easily find uses for a barrel, even if it is just something to keep the chook food in.

Calorie Requirements

For short trips or those that pass by a lot of towns, you can easily use fresh food and resupply. Moving towards longer trips with less supply points, this becomes harder and you need to plan what food to take and how much to eat to avoid losing weight. I learnt this the hard way and I took my regular dietary calorie intake (office work) into the field where I was doing over ten hours of hard physical activity a day. I was losing close to 1 kg per day and was seriously close to running out of food by the time I finished.

Firstly, how much should you be eating? If you don't resupply your body with enough food, you will lose weight. This could be a good thing on a small trip, it could become dangerous on an extended trip.

Sitting down burns around 250 to 550 kJ per hour and is about what you could burn kayaking if you let the current do all of the work. Clearly most people will be exerting themselves at a reasonable level, and for would be closer to 1,050 to 1,380 kJ for those weighing 60 and 80 kg respectively.

For an eight hour day that is 8,400 to 11,000 kJ kayaking and say 200 kJ per hour sleeping and resting. That is a grand total of 11,600 to 14,200 kJ per day.

• Calorie Calculators
  • Kayaking Calculator
  • Hiking Calculator

I carry a fairly lightweight food supply. This is what a typical days food plan looks like for me:

1,250 kJ

75g / 1 cup cereal

315 kJ

1/2 cup milk

3,765 kJ

3 energy / protein bars

5,700 kJ

Instant pasta with cheese

1,130 kJ

Tuna in oil

840 kJ

Fruits and nuts

1,250 kJ

Drinks

14,259 kJ

So my food intake is reasonably close to my energy expenditure.

For trips longer than seven days, I tend to need to alter this plan up with foods other than cheese and fresh fruit. Instant dehydrated potatoes and noodles (ramen) are two of the main carb sources I use to do this. Many suggest using excess amounts of oil, but I personally can not stomach too much oil in my diet, maybe more for long distance hiking. I also take multivitamins on the longer trips where I can't keep up with fresh foods.

I tend to lose some weight over my longer trips pushing out longer days, especially early on if my fitness isn't as high as it should be. After a few weeks paddling, I generally maintain a lower but healthy weight after I get paddle fit.

Food Options

As noted a few times already, for shorter trips this is not a major concern for paddlers, fresh food with canned hydrated options will work just fine for a week or so. For longer trips you will want to start looking at fully dehydrated options and even potentially supplementary environmental food. There are a couple of options:

Specialised Camping Food

Most camping stores will carry a range of freeze dried camping food. Many often complain about the high salt but this is likely by design for those that are active and likely sweating it out paddling or hiking. Personally, the cost factor makes these a less viable option, the portion sizes are low for active paddler. Single serve main contains around 1,675 kJ or maybe an eighth of your daily energy requirements.

Supermarket Instant Meals

This is a big step down in both variety and also in price. Instant pastas, rice, noodles and couscous all make for cheap and lightweight meals. With the $2 pastas and $1 chicken tins, I can easily live on $5 per day making long trips very affordable.

Homemade Food

This falls into the middle ground of the above two options. There are many sites online that have great recipes to do it yourself and you can make the food exactly how you like it. After the initial upfront cost of the dehydrator, bulk cooking and drying meals provide a reasonable value for money option. Time and effort are clearly the biggest limitations, well maybe the second biggest after culinary skills for some like myself!

The main caveat is when you camp on hot windy days where there could be a total fire ban, or if you are covertly camping on private land where you shouldn't be using a fire or even a cooker. My preferred go to dish in these circumstances is flavoured couscous and tuna. Simply add water and wait for 10 minutes for the grains to absorb the water.

One tip with dehydrated food is that it will cook when left in hot water. Some people will use a food thermus and all the meals to cook in that for 3 to 4 hrs. For me that means an unnnessary stop to get the cooker out, etc, so I prefer just to bring the meal to the boil and then I turn the cooker off and leave it for 10 minutes. That is enough time to allow it to finish cooking without wasting excess fuel. When using milk powder, always mix it in before you apply heat.

My "Dirtbag" Diet

I'm using this term in the original climbing sense, someone that can road trip for months on end, living off the smell of an oily rag.

Breakfast is usually skipped but often eaten as a meal during the day, sometimes on the river allowing the current work for me as I have a break. This usually just consists of some standard cerals with milk powder. I usually prepare these by premixing the ceral and milk powder into daily rations in sandwich bags before heading out. You can eat these straight out of the bag while on the water.

Coffee is still my vice, and I almost always have a cuppa in the morning. I carry a 0.5 L thermas with me and heat the water at night for the next day while I am preparing dinner. I use instant coffee premixed with milk powder that I double bag with ziplock bags. In the morning I simply add some cold water to disolve the milk powder and add the hot water. You don't even have to leave your tent!

Lunch and snacks have slowly evolved as I do more trips. Starting with dried fruits and museli bars, I now lean towards simple plan old sandwiches and some fresh fruit if in range of a store, otherwise I go back to the energy bars and snacks. The main issue is the margrine in the heat, and the jam glass jars that are heavy and always seem to come undone. I've been recycling the small marmite plastic jars to use for jam and peanut butter jars for the margine. I'll report back if successful. Peanut butter is high in fats and energy, one of the best energy to weight foods you can buy!

Dinners tend to be the cheap instant meals from the supermarkets. The $1 / $2 pastas, pre-cooked rices, favoured Cous Cous and instant noddles (ramen). For a while I would mix small tins of chicken or fish with the pastas for additional protein but now I tend to either have it plain or with some fresh bacon. I usally take blocks of cheddar to add favour and additional protien to each meal. For the other meals I usually just use small $1 plain Tuna in oil cans, or sometimes the packet tuna if it's on special. Noodles are only had infrequently and are usually had plain or with some cheese.

For snacks I usually take some chocolate or biscuits and ration these out over a week. Bags of potato chips can be deflated and resealed with Duct tape and provide an alternative snack, or energy source when pushing out really big days.

While this is a fairly high carb / oil diet, I tend to push out very long days and I find it hard to eat enough to avoid losing weight. This is a very boring diet, but it is cheap and light. It works out around maybe $5 to $7 per day. Packs down well too, I can carry up to two months food when I switch the bread out for muesli bars.