How to stop thieves when camping

Caravanning can be an expensive hobby. While the adventure is well worth the investment, having your RV or camping gear stolen is not only expensive, but can ruin the holiday.

After all, when tens of thousands of dollars of hardware are just sitting there, on wheels and ready to move, theft is a major hazard in remote areas.

Little could be more devastating than returning to your campground or free-camp to find your pride and joy missing — along with all of the essential gear we carry in it, like laptops, generators, electric bikes, portable BBQs, fishing gear, chairs and so on.

While many of us trust an unwritten code of conduct amongst fellow travellers, those rules often don’t apply in the poor, remote areas we pass through.

We have one of the highest rates of vehicle theft in the western world, and in many ways, a caravan is an easier and often more valuable, target than a car; easier to enter, easier to hide afterwards and harder to trace.

However, with a few simple precautions and some of the right gear, you can prevent thieves from bringing your travels to a premature end. 

Lock it up

There are many things that you can do to deter or prevent theft. Some are simple, like chain-locking exterior items to your tow car, chassis, or a solid tree, while others are more advanced. However everyone should be taking at least some basic precautions on their travels.

There are options to suit every budget, but when it comes to your pride and joy, spending a little now could save you an awful lot of money and heartache later.

A good starting point is a visit to a hardware store like Bunnings, where you will find a range of plastic-coated cables and padlocks. These won’t deter organised thieves armed with a portable angle grinder (also available at Bunnings!), but it still takes time and noise to disable an anti-theft device, and just as important, may send thieves to the next van or camper.

If you tend to free-camp away from others, you should consider fitting an alarmed lock with a motion-sensor to your coupling. An alarmed coupling lock is a good idea, as the thieves may not be aware whether you are out of earshot.

Of course if you come up against really well-prepared thieves with a spare coupling, they will get around this by simply undoing the four or six bolts holding yours and its alarm in place! Again, this all takes time and few thieves are so organised.

Theft is a big problem facing caravan retailers and Chris Michel, of Sunshine Coast’s Sunseeker Caravans, said it was a major worry in the early days of the company’s existence.

“We had everything on the line,” he recalled.  “It would have been very easy for smash and grab thieves to break open the gates to our yard and make off with our stock and that would have crippled us, right at the start of our business.”

Most of us would be surprised just how powerful the tools available to thieves can be. Lithium-powered portable angle grinder changed the world. They give thieves incredible power to cut through a lock quickly.

“Initially, I was very paranoid about this”, said Michel, “but when I saw an alarmed padlock on a friend’s bench it inspired me to start drawing up my own caravan locks, which can fit multiple tow couplings.

The result after 18 months of development and prototyping was the Kovic Coupling Locks, of which a specific feature is an anti-cut sleeve around the pin that spins when engaged by a grinder to make it more difficult to cut into the pin beneath. In testing, most angle grinder blades shattered before they could cut through.

These locks are also designed in such a way that a thief would have to cut all the way through in at least two locations to get it off and more than half of the Kovix locks that Michel’s firm Protrek sells in Australia have been invented specifically for him and the Australian market.

However, the biggest deterrent is their motion-sensing alarm that screams at 120 decibels, making it difficult to finish cutting through one of the locks.

A specific, but important design feature of the alarm is it won’t embarrass you in a caravan park. The motion sensors are quite sensitive, so the team had to build in a warning and delay before the alarm activated, so that a dog brushing against the lock won’t wake the whole caravan park.

After the alarm has started, if the motion stops, the alarm will too. Then it simply resets, so that if anyone continues to try to tamper with it, they’ll continue to be blasted with the attention-grabbing noise.

Be smart where you park

Of course, a lock on your camper or caravan’s hitch isn’t the only anti-theft deterrent you should consider. Most crime is opportunistic, so the more temptation you remove, the safer you are.

This can be as simple as parking your caravan somewhere visible at free camps or caravan parks and becoming acquainted with your campsite neighbours. If they know who owns the van, they’ll be more likely to stop strangers from messing with it. And this visibility alone will deter plenty of thieves.

However, if it’s a bit of isolation that you’re looking for when picking a camp spot, there are plenty of other options. First, remove temptation by locking up or padlocking your gear before you leave the RV for any length of time.

Fishing gear, tools, even something as simple as camp chairs can be walked away if left out. Locking items like this in your caravan’s storage bins will go a long way to keeping thieves from becoming interested in your campsite.

Sadly, the bin locks used on most caravan doors and hatches are not particularly sophisticated and can easily be picked by an experienced thief, while a pinch bar can do the job if you can’t breach the lock.

Sadly, no matter how well designed, a caravan will never be as secure as a brick and mortar building, so store high-value, portable items inside, and lock them away, ideally out of sight.

Leaving laptops, phones, tablets and other items lying around may result in you returning to camp to find a broken window and your beloved gadgets missing. I hide such items under the bed, or its bedding, when I leave for a walk.

For items left outside, cable locks with the same motion sensor alarms as the tow hitch locks are the optimum solution. It takes just a matter of seconds to loop a few of these cable locks through everything, especially as they can be combined together for extra length. The cable locks will also fit through the zipper of an esky, a tent, or anything else that you’d want to secure.

Caravan recovery technology

Once loose items in your campsite are secure and your caravan is protected with a hitch or wheel lock — preferably an alarmed one — the next thing to consider is a solution for if the worst still happens and your whole rig disappears.

Fortunately, there are a few high-tech solutions to help the police bring it back.

Datadots are a cutting-edge idea from an Aussie company called DataDot Technology. These barely visible dots, the size of a grain of sand, carry ownership information that can help police return a caravan to its rightful owners.

Their small size and relative cheapness mean they can be placed in multiple locations all over a caravan, tow rig or anything else. Various DIY kits are also available.

Another high-tech option is a dedicated GPS tracker, available from dozens of manufacturers. Most of these work in the same way, with a smartphone-sized device that you position in a hidden spot inside your van. Then, using a smartphone app or a paired device, you can track your caravan’s location at any time.

AL-KO has led the anti-theft technology charge for some tears now with its ATS GPS tracking system. Unlike devices that require a SIM card and a mobile phone plan with data limits, the ATS’s in-built M2M (machine to machine) connectivity chip provides instant global connectivity via the 3G network with unlimited data.

Some anti-theft GPS devices are activated by an annual subscription, so with caravan travel often being infrequent, you need to ensure your subs are up to date before heading off.

I’ve also used a Spot Satellite GPS Messenger to allow my family and friends to keep track of my travels in remote areas, so that they can see if I’ve stopped unexpectedly for longer than intended and hit the places projected on my trip plan, which I’ve shared in advance.

In an emergency, say a vehicle roll-over, a broken leg or a snakebite, a push of a button can connect you to a GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Centre, where they can provide your GPS coordinates and information to local response teams.

What’s particularly handy for travellers is SPOT’s customised tracking features that uses motion-activated tracking regardless of the level of service you choose. This allows you to set up a vibration sensor to tell your SPOT to send track updates when you are moving and to stop when you do.

You can send a pre-programmed text message or an email with GPS coordinates to up to 10 contacts with your location. Your waypoint is then stored in your SPOT account for later reference and your stored waypoints can be easily integrated into a shared view. 

If you decide (unwisely) to abandon your RV, you can take your SPOT with you on foot, or on a boat, to track and transmit your location.

But if you choose to leave your SPOT in your RV and the RV is stolen, you and the authorities will be able to track where it's gone.

To do all this you'll need a SPOT device (the latest Gen 4 units cost around $200) and then purchase a service plan (from around $15/ month for a 12-month contract. A number of other GPS Trackers are on the market, so check around.

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