Razorback - Knives said:
How many times have you actually be caught in a survival situation?
The last one was about a year ago, I was fishing on cliff's near the ocean. I had taken all normal procautions, people knew where I was, I was expected back, and I watched the water for about a half hour before I climbed down the rocks to get close enough to fish.
After about another half hour I was looking to my right trying to spot another place to fish from when out of the corner of my eye to my left I saw a wave start to crest a ways out. From the size I knew I was going to get some spray and thought "Damn, I am going to have to leave early."
As I brought my head back around slowly the wave got larger and I knew it wasn't just getting wet that was a concern. I could not get out of the way as it would take me about ten seconds to get off the rock onto higher ground and if I was hit while moving it would be a bad day.
I knew I had to take the first impact and flattened myself against the cliff face so I would not get slammed back against it and just steadied myself for the impact. I thought I had some idea of what it would be like, I was wrong. I was picked up, turned around and slammed into the rocks.
By some massive fluke I landed face down and was able to grab onto the rock as the wave receeded and stop being pulled out. I lost most of the skin off my finger tips as I was dragged back, I also took significant impacts on my elbows and hips, lost large patches of skin there.
Never felt a thing though, when I picked myself up the rush was so high I felt invunerable. As it wore off the pain set in and I was limping fast and had problems walking. It took about a week before I walked without noticing a limp and much longer before all the skin healed back.
After this happened I spent some time trying to figure out what could have been done, obviously never go down so far you can't get back up is one, but that wave was so rare. I have never seen the like of it before and have fished there maybe a thousand times. I would never drive a car using the same logic.
I spent some time talking about it with my brother who swims there and he would have ran and dived into it and says he has done it lots of times and that you can break through the crest. Which is something that I plan to spent time doing this summer.
I have also had a lot of things happen which could have been bad but I was prepared. I tend to overprepare for the worst out of habit, quite frankly I am not one of those "all I need is my brain" guys, forget that, I want all the advantges I can get.
The earliest time I can remember I was early teens and camping with a friend. We were a few hours walk inland to a pond to go ice fishing we had one of those weird days where the temp went up above zero and it started to rain, we stayed out it in for awhile fishing until we got too cold and could not run the reels and headed back to camp to change clothes.
We got back to our tent to find it flooded and everything soaked. However I had packed most things in sobeys bags (habit learned early in the woods) and split up the clothes and jogged out leaving the tent and most of the gear there. Now it might not sound like much, but get soaking wet and try to jog a two hour walk in the cold with the temp dropping. You get wet and the heat loss is massively higher than just air.
Most rules are fairly simple, let people know where you are going and when you expect to be back, assume the worst will happen, pack the most you can, assume it will all get lost anyway and prepare for that. If you really want it to to work you have to be consisent, you tell people you will be back at five and you don't, well guess what, if something happens they are going to give you that extra time as well.
About the most important thing I can thing of is the willingness to accept you are in a bad situation and that you have to do something and the outcome may be pretty shitty either way, often you are just picking the least damaging of bad situations. Last winter I spent some trying trying to figure out how to handle low clothing in colds.
For example take normal summer clothing, now get out in the freezing cold and try to be productive. If you don't shelter your hands they go numb very fast and you can't do anything, build a shelter, start a fire, forget it. However unless you keep your core warm you lose heat fast. Difficult decisions.
I also do a lot of things like work with my off hand, work with my fingers splinted, work one handed with two handed tools (axes). This is one of the reasons that I think a lot of evalautions of "survival" tools are lacking as they assume proper techique with optimal conditions (mine included).
I am not sure how to include this directly, still working on it, but next time you have one of your blades and want to do some field trials, get really cold and do work with your off hand primarily and note just how much more stress the blade sees because your skill and control are shot.
Plus high stress alone does this, splitting a piece of wood when it doesn't matter if it splits or not is one things, splitting it when you are cold and getting colder are another, which is why I will look at optimal technique and sloppy technique when batoning, the latter being about ten times as bad as the former on the knife ususally.
I have poor ability to handle the heat though, no experience, it never gets that hot here, but I have been invited to the tropics with a friend and may go there next year. Plus I hope to spend some time in Labrador as it gets colder there (-40 often down to -50 then wind chill) and you can't even let your face get exposed. Plus friends of the family own sled dogs so I might get a chance to work with them.
Read what you can, talk to who you can and then get out and do it. Knowing how by memory is nice but often time the devil is in the details and you can know something fairly simple or it seems that way and then you do it and find out it isn't as easy. Plus the more you do it the more you figure out what is really important, what you do well, what you do poorly and where you need to improve.
-Cliff
