Bush skills in real life....

roninelh

roninelh

Joined
Dec 14, 2010
Messages
610
Something funny happened to me today and thought I would share.. Me and my wife volunteered at a dog/human blood drive and it was a blast. Well, the sign they had out front of the clinic was just zip tied to two wooden poles and barely hammered into the soft ground and it was folding up and falling down. Well, bushcraft skills to the rescue! I went to my jeep and retrieved some cordage, my fiskars axe, my mora knife and some wood pieces I had been planning on using for knife handle material. I used these materials to quickly make a couple of tent stakes, stabalize the sign with the cordage, and pound everything into place. While not being rocket science, people thought it was pretty cool.

So my question is; have you ever used your bushcraft or survival skills in a not so "wild" situation?

Also, I now have an "I told you so" story for when my wife says I dont need to carry important woodcraft tools with me at all times!
 
Good idea for a thread and nice story. Mine is pretty unspectacular, but here it goes:

I was invited to a garden party at a friends place 2 years ago. Their idea was to make a real fire and grill some stuff over wooden coals and later roast marshmallows and sit by the open fire. A pretty nice and uncommon idea, since the tiny garden is located on the back of a house in a small city in europe. So when I arrived they had a metal bowl (old wok) and big, logs of beech to use as firewood, only split in halves or quarters, that was it, lol! I was a bit puzzled as they must have thought you just hold a match below the logs and you have a campfire. There was no axe around either. No fire starters either! But: I had my Izula with me and after batoning off a few smaller pieced from one of the big logs and making a couple of fuzz sticks we had no problem to get a nice campfire going. As it often happens when you get a chance to show some of your outdoor skills to people who are not into such things (especially those including a knife, even if it's just an izula), the atmosphere had a mixture of both thankfulness and uneasiness to it. But in the end, people were just happy to grill a sausage and warm up by the fire. It got quite cold that night!

Best regards,

ll.
 
lightleak said:
As it often happens when you get a chance to show some of your outdoor skills to people who are not into such things (especially those including a knife, even if it's just an izula), the atmosphere had a mixture of both thankfulness and uneasiness to it.
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It's funny you mention this, I have noticed it a time or two in the past. I am often the go to "fire guy" and people sometimes seem a little uneasy I would have a swiss army knife on me, of all things to be scared of, and actually know how to use it for something besides wine bottles. I wonder how uneasy these people would be if there was no one to take care of them in a serious disaster.
 
It really is shocking to findo out how many people have no idea how to light a fire, even with all of the dry materials! "They must have thought you just hold a match below the logs"- this cracked me up, but a lot of people are like that. I like to take oppurtunities like that to educate a little, even if its just people seeing the propper way to light a fire/prepare materials properly.
 
lightleak said:
As it often happens when you get a chance to show some of your outdoor skills to people who are not into such things (especially those including a knife, even if it's just an izula), the atmosphere had a mixture of both thankfulness and uneasiness to it.
Click to expand...

Definitely. My experiences with people more accustomed to never escaping air-conditioned shelters agree that they typically are distrustful of any skills which exhibit self-reliance or involve getting one's hands dirty ;)
 
I've got a story, last summer I was at a bonfire at the beach with some friends and somebody brought a bag of marshmallows and nobody was roasting any because all the small twigs around had already been thrown in the fire. They started the fire by pouring a container of lighter fluid on some logs before I showed up. So I found a long piece of wood, split it and sharpened it with my Benchmade Adamas. Speared a marshmallow and handed it to the girl beside me. Turned out she was a German exchange student and she asked why I had a knife. I replied with one of the only words in German I know, "Kamfmesser". She laughed and roasted us some marshmallows while I made some more roasting sticks.
 
bigghoss said:
Which means...?

Tried to google it but all I got was "kampfmesser" which was some german combat knife.
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That's what he said. :)

He doesn't know German, but he picked up the spoken word for one kind of knife well enough.
 
I persuaded my woman to go to hospital with a branding iron: She was in a lot of pain and given the nature of it and that she isn't predisposed to being a whinging bitch it sounded just like appendicitis. She was most loathed to go to the hospital. Eventually I persuaded her to phone 999 and the twerp on the other end told her to go and sit in a hot bath and she'd feel better. Despite her telling him that she couldn't get off the bed let alone to the bath she made no headway and resigned herself to defeat. I wasn't at all happy about that so I twisted a length of wire into the word “idiot”. I told her someone would be showing up to take her to hospital and if I was wrong I was going to brand that into my leg, but if I was right I expected her to do the same. She is currently completing her remission and is in her 5 of 6 weeks off work. Happily nobody got burnt. I made my point before it needed to go live. Jobsagoodun.
 
My wife used to give me a hard time, but we've been on enough trips to where a lot of the items in our kit have been used..especially the ibuprofen and bandaids, flashlights etc..she has been converted..can't tell you how many times the 550 cord has been used..one example is had an accident in a parking lot, 550 cord from kit, and duct tape were used to secure back door, and help secure a make shift window out of card board, as was going to rain before I got off work..was a good day.
 
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