In earlier blogs I wrote that I was going to be off-grid for five days of river kayaking. To keep the photo-junkie in us alive, my husband and I carried two cameras, six batteries, and a lot of flash memory. In more detail, we had a Canon PowerShot Pro1 with two spare batteries, a recently upgraded 2GB compact flash card, an old 1GB compact flash card as a spare, plus our new Panasonic DMC-TZ1 camera, with two spare batteries equipped with a 2GB flash card (SD).

Shoot, Don't Review: Before the trip, we took a ‘no review' pledge to save battery power. The idea was that while in the wilderness, away from any way to recharge, we would not review the pictures we had taken. Sure, it would have been fun each night to pass around the cameras and look at what we had taken that day, the good, the bad, and the blurry, but that takes power we wanted to reserve for actually taking pictures. It was hard, and we broke the rule after kayaking through a sea filled with Beluga whales, but in general we didn't see our photos till after the trip, when AC was restored to our lives.

Bring More Than You Need: At the end of the trip, each camera had drained about one and a half batteries. I'm glad we took three for each camera, even though it was more than we needed.

Flash Drives are Small and Not That Expensive: On the storage front, we took about 400 photos, total. Remember that while kayaking it's a bit awkward to reach for the camera, which is enclosed in a hard-to-open drybag, so our total might be lower than if we had been biking or hiking or touring in Europe for the same amount of time. In our case, each 2GB card was about half full by the end of the trip. Mine (on the Panasonic) was a bit less used than my husband's, partly because I had a harder time just navigating the paddling.

Salt Kills:  On the last day of the trip I got sloppy. I launched my boat without securing my dry bag and my camera took a dive into about a foot of salt water.  I immediately retreived it and flushed it out with fresh water. (Talk about a sick feeling! Imagine pouring your last drinking water into your ailing camera.) I also removed the memory card and battery and then dried the camera in the sun. These are the normal things you should do if your camera gets salt water in it. I added a little prayer to the mix. Turns out that my photos are intact but the camera, alas, did not resuscitate. Panasonic's giving it the once over to confirm my prognosis, but I'm not optimistic.

Things we forgot? The biggest omission was cleaning supplies. Both cameras were used while paddling on salt water, which led to some filmy deposits on the lenses and bodies. Luckily another paddler had brought some photo lens wipes. Next time, we'll bring our own.

And in case you think this is all really obvious, one ‘pro' photographer was on the trip. He came with a single camera, battery not fully charged even at the outset, and he was out of battery by the end of the first day. It's not hard to beat the pros, if you think ahead.