The camera drum mkII - study (part 1)I don't know how your canoe looks like when its ready for a long wilderness trip, mine is completely loaded. Some of the watertight bags are even a little under pressure. Add with that some water in your canoe and you will almost automatically come to a packaging which is and watertight and made of a hard material. If you go think about it you will end with a drum (or is it barrel?). Most drums are round and can be bought in several sizes. 
A rubber ring is mounted in the lid, in this way you can seal your barrel watertight and airtight. Ideal for storing your expensive camera during the trip. But you can't store it right away, all parts laying loose will collide together during transport and this will damage your equipment severely. So you have to re-pack your gear into the drum. You can wrap each piece in a protective soft material, but that's not user friendly if you also want to make pictures during paddling in the middle of a lake. The next story is about a drum special made for carrying Olympus digital stuff like the E-1, E-3 or E-5 with accompanied lenses and other useful stuff (For owners of a Canon, Nikon, Pentax setup, there is a drum which is 10 centimetres higher, so you can store your longer lenses.). The story comes in two parts, part one the study and how you can adapt to your situation. The second story is about building the drum, of course with my equipment in mind, but it won't be difficult to adapt to an other configuration. Before we start, there are cases from several brands like Pelican cases. All those cases suffer from one big problem. You need twice the space when you're going to open it. This is not the case with a drum, unscrew the lid, you can put it aside anyway you like it and you have your equipment ready to go. I did test my drum with enclosed all my gear and a few other items in a lake in Sweden. I just dropped it from about 1 meter above the water into the lake. It did go down at first but it did also come up at the surface and stayed there with about 1/3 under water and about 2/3 above water, hanging over to the most heaviest point, i.e. the combination of the two heaviest lenses. Unfortunately I don't have a picture, the camera was inside the drum. After some thoughts I decided that this was logical. My drum can contain about 17 litres liquid, that's about 17kg and the total weight of the gear is about 1/3 of that.The first thing you have to do is choosing what you take with you. Remind, everything has to go into the drum. If you own already all your gear than you can put it roughly in a circle. If you don't own everything (future plans) you have to rely on the available technical data. How silly it sounds today, the latter was my case, I had no Olympus stuff when I thought out this plan! It was also a study for finding out which brand I had to choose as successor of my Minolta S1 stuff (film, but weatherproof) from which the body died. Don't put the items too close together because you must be able to take them out of the drum for use. Take measurements of length and diameter or copy those from the technical data from the lens. Next take the largest part and note down all dimensions like length, wide etc. This part have to go through the opening of the drum. With the accumulated data you can go to a distributor. You are going to find a suitable drum. Most off them are white with a red lid, but you have also blue with a black lid, grey with a blue lid or totally grey. The white drums with a red lid are made by Curtec (www.curtec.com). The so called "total opening" drums are very suited for the purpose and the shown 17 litre model in the picture does have very handy dimensions. On the right side you will find the profile of the 17 litre drum. The height is including the lid, the usable height is 195mm. If an lens is longer than you can't screw the lid tight on or you damage that lens. In Holland we have to go to a distributor which sells to private persons (i.e. none business). Don't know the situation elsewhere.
If you choose for an other brand than Curtec, be advised to pay special interest to the lid. Sometimes the lid consist of two parts. Some kind of cover with a ring. First you put the cover on the drum and then you screw the ring tight. It will give a waterproof solution, but not as good as when the lid is from one piece. Second, the cover is very lightweight and can be picked up by a small breeze. Third, undoing two things in a canoe is too much and too slow and will take more space. These drums seems in Holland very popular with farmers. Next its wise to find out if everything will fit before you purchase any equipment like lenses. When the drum is empty it seems like you have all the room in the world, but seen from practical view this isn't the case and very disappointing. From the given technical data you can read that the opening is much smaller than the diameter. This neck with screw thread can be an handicap for taking out lenses or bodies with one hand or for mounting the interior for lenses and alike. It can be very useful in making a computer drawing of the drum (floor and side view) with the different pieces of equipment in order to protect you from nasty surprises. Such a "study" can be found below. I used a program like Excel.
** incl. 5mm extra for protection
The pictures on the right shows my old "mkI" model drum for the Minolta S1. Its obvious that this Curtec model 7010 is too small, the 7000 series have openings which are 5 cm. less in diameter than the "total opening" drums at its best. In the drawing with the profile you can see the two tele converters stacked on the extension tube. The height of these three pieces of equipment is about the same as the total length of a 50-200mm zoomlens. Because of the length this lens has to be mounted in the neck/opening and then there is no room anymore for the other lenses or for the body.
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