Real Survival With No Food; Banking Fires; CAT Tourniquets | #AskPaulKirtley 70

Description

Welcome to Episode 70 of #AskPaulKirtley, where I answer questions about real survival with no food, the best areas for kayaking and wild camping in the UK, banking fires overnight, Combat Application Tourniquets (CAT) in first aid kits and Bow-drilling standing up.

TIMESTAMPS:

01:24 Real survival with no food…

18:57 Best areas for kayaking and wild camping in the UK?

22:50 Banking fires overnight

33:24 Combat Application Tourniquets (CAT) in first aid kits?

39:47 Bow-drill standing up?

LINKS MENTIONED:

PK Podcast 028: Joe Robinet On His Love Of Camping, Bushcraft & Making A Living On YouTube http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2018/joe-robinet-camping-bushcraft-youtube/

Survival Foraging: A Realistic Approach http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2013/survival-foraging-a-realistic-approach/

Frontier Bushcraft Field Courses http://frontierbushcraft.com/courses/

Canoe & Kayak Map Of Britain https://amzn.to/2v4ZQjK

Scottish Canoe Touring: https://amzn.to/2v3TdxZ

https://www.ukriversguidebook.co.uk/

https://www.opencanoe.info/

http://www.songofthepaddle.co.uk/forum/forum.php

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Tags: bushcraft,survival,wilderness,camping,hiking,outdoors,question and answer,advice,questions,answers,bushcrafting,nature,self reliance,self sufficiency,outdoor skills,outdoor knowledge,Paul Kirtley,askpaulkirtley

Video Transcription

in this episode of a sport currently we are going to be talking about real survival with no food the best rivers for paddling and wild camping banking fires for the next morning cap turner case and doing the bow drill standing up [Music]

welcome welcome to episode 17 of a sport currently with me Paul Curley where I answer your questions on wilderness bushcraft survival skills and outdoor life in general and I'm back in the South of England back in the lovely woods of the South of England and it's feeling a little bit more mild and I think this is the first I spoke curtly in a long while that I've not worn a wooly hat or a warm hat or some description it's actually quite pleasant out today so without further ado let's get on with the questions first question is from Matt and this is via Twitter and he asks hi Paul have you ever done a real survival starting out with no food in your backpack and if so what did you experience

well what one thing I would say and this might be a matter of semantics I know Twitter is you've only got a short number of words you can use on Twitter and I would say that any anything where you intend to go out and do something is a training exercise more than a real situation in that sense so that it's worth having that distinction in your mind to start off with of course training can be very realistic particularly if it is coordinated by someone that isn't taking part in the exercise and is setting the boundaries setting the rules making it difficult perhaps in terms of what you are and aren't allowed to do and of course when you do those exercises it's worth sticking to those rules because if you you know any any sort of exercise there may be a way of cheating you know burying Mars bars the week before or whatever it is but there is this very very little point in cheating on those sorts of exercises because you don't learn the full amount that you can learn from that experience and so yes I have done exercises where I've gone out with no food and then sort to to live from the land albeit for a limited period you know not weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks but yes long enough to start to feel that that could be possible and because in some ways it's that first bit if you're talking about survival situations where all of a sudden you're in a situation where you've got very little in terms of food caches established shelter establish routines established economy if you like in the natural environment that's your typical survival situation where you've gone from being you know well fed warm satisfied you know whatever scenario that you'd like to think up along the way and there are lots of them you know you can draw from reality of things that have happened to people whether it's plane crashes or canoe capsizes or vehicle breakdowns or a member of the parties injured or somebody losing a backpack on a river crossing or lots and lots of situations you could come up with where okay now I've left with what I have with me I don't have all the things I would like how do I survive until I'm rescued until we can resolve the situation ourselves whatever the scenario you'd like to Train and people do train for different scenarios of course because training helps training is important so while these situations are not real in that sense the training for a potential real arduous situation is valuable and one of the things a lot of people have is a romantic idea about just being able to go and live off the land in a lot of places that's very difficult even if you're quite skilled if you're just inserted into an environment with no water no food no shelter very little equipment it's hard so you have to stand up on your own two feet think of it like you've just landed flat on your face and you have to get up on your hands and knees and you have to get up on your feet and once you're up on your feet you can start doing more and in a way that's what your first few days are like in those sorts of situations where you know if you were dumped into this environment of this type of environment sort of northern temperate for example and yes I'm not far away from habitation there are there's an airport 30 40 miles away from here you can hear the planes going over you wouldn't be surviving in this situation but you could be surviving in this type of environment you could be surviving in this type of environment at this time of year and there isn't a huge amount of food a rat just lying around like you know certain times of the year there's berries there's nuts there's tuberous roots that are easy to find there's lots of things you could eat before you start looking at animal foods and you know it's probably the plant foods that you're always going to turn to first in most most environments but there isn't a lot at this time of year I'm recording this towards the end of March and it will be going out probably early April this episode and around about this time year is of early spring there's not a lot of food around and your priorities are going to be shelter initially protection from the environment is you know as long as you haven't got any sort of medical issue to deal with or injury protection from the environment is going to be your initial and that's your clothing that's your shelter that's fire and in terms of gay a shelter even a rudimentary shelter and a fire going and some firewood in to stay warm overnight that's quite a lot of work for your first day out as it were and you know when we run courses so on our intermediate course we have people do that exercise we're okay guys you've got two things to do today you've got to build a shelter that you're going to live in for the week and you've got to light fire by friction I'm using probably bow drill and because that's the most widely applicable technique and you don't have any hand drills prepared etc etc so you know fire by friction probably bow drill and a shelter that's your job for today and that's tiring yeah because she can't purify you water until you get a fire going if you're just boiling and so you've got to get your fire sorted you've got to get water on you've got to get firewood in you've got to build a shelter you've got a thatch it you've got to make beds perhaps and you have or even just read them entry beds and you have to have some firewood to get to stay warm overnight because even though it's quite pleasant it's gonna be cooler again it at night it's probably going to be ten ten degrees cooler than it is at the moment it's up into the sort of you know maybe towards fourteen degrees today it feels like but it's going to be back down to about four or five overnight and so that's quite cold and lying around within just your clothes and those sorts of temperatures is quite chilly you need a fire so just getting that done in you're not going to get any food and you know most people get grumpy if they miss a meal you know um you know if people don't have a lunch if you just have breakfast and you don't hate anything all day people get grumpy people get slow people slur the words people make decisions much more slowly or fail to make decisions and one of the one of the valuable things about doing exercises where you also don't have food it's not something we don't do that on the intermediate course that I was talking about they do the fire they do the shelter but there they've got food but if you do that when you don't have any food it's that much harder and then the next day you're starting empty and then you've got to maybe start thinking about food and then you might not find very much initially and so you know being able to just operate for several days without very much food with a low glycogen in your system is a valuable experience and one that most people don't have and as I say they have and and I was the same you have this sort of rose-tinted like I know edible foods I know this that and the other I know you know I can I can fish I can hobo fish and I know how to set a snare but then when you actually go out and do it when you don't have any food in you it's that much harder and so those exercises are extremely valuable and that's one of the things if you listen to the podcast I did with Jo Robinette a while ago we talked about those sort of exercises where you go out and don't have any food and you have to live from the land and how that makes you feel and you know whether it's just you know I remember one exercise I was doing when I had thumb I had a thumping headache and it was probably a combination of dehydration tiredness smoke inhalation in the shelter lack of caffeine low blood sugar and it was highly unpleasant and and I got an upset stomach and probably just because I was having a lot of liquid and a little bit of plant food and not very much else and yeah you've got to deal with all of those things while trying to get your own food from the environment and it's it's tough and of course as you improve as I say it's like like you're flat on your face and then you get up on you on all fours and then slowly you stand up on two feet and so as you improve as you know two three four or five days in you should you should have a shelter you should have a fire your shelters being improved you started to get food you start to know where to find it you starting to her tune in on the resources that you can get in that environment maybe you've got some snares out maybe you've got some fishing stuff going on you start to get some food in and then you start to improve because if you just stop you're just waiting to die basically so in reality and you have to go through those exercises with that mentality I've seen students on courses many years ago I remember running a course probably about ten years ago where there were three guys in ER in a group and two of them really were just waiting for the end of the week they knew that the course finished on Saturday and they couldn't really be bothered to go and find any food they were just lying around in the shelter and

and of course they went home on Saturday but the you know one guy was trying his hardest but clearly he couldn't carry the load for the other two the other two weren't really doing very much and they got more and more despondent and and just sort of went into a bit of a circle of you know just just sitting around waiting and you know in reality had they been in that situation where they weren't rescued if you're thinking of it in that sort of terms they'd have died because they weren't getting them themselves any food and they didn't really learn anything about finding food or have any data points in terms of what what made them feel better when they were really low because I you know I remember just having a few sweet berries just a few bright berries just made me feel so much better I remember making a cordial out of elderberries and and fruit on one exercise and some other fruits and just sort of drinking that hot in the morning and that just perked you up so much more than it would do on a normal day you know when you and you're just out and about in the woods but because we'd had so little food and because our senses were attenuated it just tasted so good it made you feel so good and I remember eating beech nuts as well as we're out foraging for food just getting a few beech nuts and shelling them and getting them into my system even the pith of Rose Bay willow herb fireweed that tastes you know it tastes something like between melon and cucumber similar consistency there's a bit of sugar in there just scraping it out the center of the the stems of those plants and getting that into our systems just as a bit of a snack just you just feel the benefit straightaway and you think more clearly you can keep going for longer and that was really really good but just having those experience of knowing what it feels like to be dehydrated knowing what it feels like to be tired hungry that's the other thing that's going on as well if you're in those sorts of situations is you're not getting your eight hours and undisturbed sleep by any stretch of the imagination you wake up cold you get the fire going a bit more you go back to sleep it's nice and warm you wake up with smoke in your face you're uncomfortable you've got a lot you know you've got a stump in your side or root or the cold starts coming up through your bed because she the first night you haven't really been able to make your bed as well as you would like because you ran at a time all these things you know you tired you're hungry you dehydrated you're trying to find the food but that's a valuable valuable experience and if you want to do that sort of thing I would recommend you do it in some sort of controlled way and yes once you've got more experience you can go out and do that on your own and I have done that on my own and it's a great thing to do what you just going to go to the woods and I'm going to take a few things and yeah you can tap out whenever you want you know I you know a few days in you can say right okay I've got what I wanted from this but it's really nice just to go out into the woods and take a few rudimentary you know your knife and your saw and a few of the bits and pieces and just go right okay well let's see what I can do for the next few days that's a really good enabling thing to do at some stage once your skills are up but do bear in mind that you make more mistakes when you retired when you're hungry when your blood sugar gets down you see it even with people you're getting close to lunchtime with some people who haven't eaten for you know four or five hours since breakfast they get a bit you know a bit blurry mentally and that's you know even just working in an office or something you see it with people working outdoors as well that they start to slow down they start to you can tell that they're thinking really hard about things I see it more in the cold when you're working in cold environments at the end of the day and you're setting up tents and you're getting firewood in you know this might be setting up a heated tent for example you can see the person in the group that's slowing down it's maybe got low blood sugar and if you've got a snack you can give them give them a snack because then they come back up and they work at the speed of the rest of the group decisions are made quicker things are done quicker and you all get in quicker and of course if you've got no food then that you have to deal with that herbs and flows and some people will have moments when they really need to sit down and have a rest and other people will have you know they'll have good energy at that time and then other times that be the other way around so when you're working as a group you have to accommodate the fact that some people are going to be up when other people are down and so on and so forth and if you're on your own you got to be really careful because it's easier to see in other people than it is to see in yourself and if you're impaired you start misidentifying foods you miss identifying plants miss identifying fungi those are mistakes you don't want to be making so initially if you can do those sorts of exercises where you've got somebody who's like a safety marshal not breathing down your neck all the time there are ways of doing it just you've foraged things show them first they of course have to have good wild food knowledge as well remember if in doubt leave it out that's the most important thing and do it in a way that you're not just asking them you know can I eat this can I eat this can I this go out thinking okay well I think this is this I think this is this I think this is this I can eat this I can make a tea from this can add this to us too we can roast these seeds whatever it is take them and then show them to this other person who's got equally good knowledge if not better knowledge than you and get them to double check and they're not doing the exercise with you they're being well fed they're being well watered they are your your safety marshal as it were and then the people who do in the exercise can have those ups and downs and lows and if you make a mistake then you've got a safety net and it's a learning experience it's a training experience and you could have a forfeit you know it doesn't have to be a cost-free mistake it could it could be a forfeit where you have to give something up you might have to give up your woolly hats or your knife or your soror one of your snares or something that you've got with you that is going to be something of an impediment if you don't have it maybe you have to give that up if you bring in a poisonous mushroom that you think is an edible one that's much better than eating it and so you can play those sorts of games and make them quite realistic and and have consequence to your decisions but do it in a way that you're not going to come to physical harm so yeah I would recommend that you do that if you can but do be very very careful with just going out with the idea of going out and living off the land if your knowledge particularly of the plants and the fungi is not as sharp as as it could be and really make sure you've got that stuff sharpened off and then go out and apply it and it's a great thing to it's really you really feel like you've you've broken free of something when you can just go into nature and be alright you know be fine in terms of shelter and fire and food and water of course and it's a fantastic enabling feeling so I would thoroughly recommend it quite a long answer but a good a good topic of discussion and I will I will link to some articles that are relevant to foraging and was a nice mnemonic that I came up with you reap that is useful to know in terms of what foods to go for certainly initially I'll link to that below the video wherever you're watching this if you're watching it as a video and if you're listening to this as a podcast just go to Paul curtly co dot UK forward slash ask for currently seven zero and you will go to the page where the video and audio for this podcast is as well as all of the links any of the links that I mentioned they will also be there alright another question from Dave via Twitter and he asks what are the best areas or rivers for kayaking and wild camping in the UK not white water okay um well that's quite a broad question really you say rivers yeah I mean the thing is a lot of rivers in the UK if you're considering them from start to finish will have some moving water on them and we're quite a small island and most of the rivers from source-to-sea are not very far and some of them can be quite steep certainly in terms of sort of continental standards and so you do tend to get little flourishes of our sections of whitewater even on rivers that are otherwise slack that said there are some very nice gentle you know one of the classic ones is the River Wye and there are

campsites along you know you can canoe that or you can kayak that I you've said kayak whether you mean kayaking exclusively or whether you're just encompassing all paddling and so you know you can canoe that in an open canoe or kayak that in a in a kayak and of course if you're if you're willing to get involved in sea kayaking as well there's lots of coasts and estuaries and things that can be explored as well I would carry out all of this with getting the relevant introductory instruction wherever you're going in terms of camping if you're in in England and Wales

you've got the same issue as you have anywhere in England and Wales if you want a wild camping that's strictly speaking you need to have landowners permission

there is no wild land as such that you can go and camp on particularly as rivers tend to be in the in the lowlands you know there are some upland areas in England and Wales you know Lake District Peak District Snowdonia where you know upland camping is is tolerated but strictly speaking even that is not legal it tends to be a little bit more contested lower down you've got people fishing you've got people's homes you've got farms you've got other land use issues going on down there where you know you camping there might be an issue but there are places along the way that like I said the river wye where there are organized campsites and you can camp what I would recommend you getting is there is a map that you can get and I will link to it under under here I have a copy of it at home and you open it out and it has all of the rivers in in the UK and

it has a color scheme that shows you you know what sort of water they are whether they're flat water whether they're more bouncy or whether they're exclusively you know four kayaks or whether you can go on and canoe in terms of the grade whether it's you know grade 1 grade 2 grade 3 etc so that's a useful map to have I think it's just cause I'm about the canoe and kayak map or something along those lines and I know you can get it on Amazon I'll link to it underneath this in Scotland so so I'm rambling on here a little bit the map won't necessarily tell you where you can camp but it will show you where the rivers are and then you can you can research you know you can get on Google and say okay what in England and Wales can I can I paddle this and camp you know other places I can camp along this river because you know you can't just look at the map and assume you can camp along those in Scotland however the law is different with respect to wild camping and you can wild camp as long as you're not imposing on people's privacy and as long as you're not interfering with economic activity so you know you're not damaging farmers crops or something for example so you've got more leeway and of course on that map again you can see where those rivers are you can see where the locks are and that will give you a good idea of the places you might be looking at but what I would also recommend and I've brought this out because I read I read through the questions last night briefly while I was preparing them this book here Scottish canoe touring that's a really nice book in terms of briefly giving you a summary of rivers and locks and routes that you can do so joined up as it were and that's the Scottish canoe association canoe and kayak guide and it has lots and lots of different routes all over all over Scotland lots of different lots of different area so I'd recommend getting hold of that book there's there's lots and lots of opportunity for the type of canoe or kayak camping you sound like you want to do in Scotland and as I say if you want to go in England and Wales get hold of that map and then you're gonna have to do some research on what the camp restrictions are along a river that might take you fancy okay so I know I didn't give you a specific answer but there's there's lots of opportunity you just have to sort of decide where you want to go broadly and then drill down into that so I would say get the map get the Scottish Canoe Association canoe touring canoe and kayak touring and you'll be good to go better research have a great trip and if there's lots and lots of people that can give you advice I you can get online and have a look at the UK rivers guide they'll give you some indication of what what sections of particular rivers are like as well and also get on there is open canoe Association in which you could join if you're interested in open canoeing in particular and they're very helpful in terms of where you can go and they also have you know meetups and what-have-you and then of course there are forums like song of the paddle for example that you can join and talk to people on there about maybe where to go so there's I'll link to all of that below and that's all worth looking into and one of the fun things about canoe trips or any type of trip is sort of looking at a map and kind of going plates boat looks cool and looks interesting and then diving in deeper doing research and planning a trip and then executing the trip is it's a really nice thing to do from start to finish okay next question banking fires for the next morning this is from Craig Taylor recording hi Paul it's great Taylor here I hope you keep your money you've had a good Christmas my ask Paul Kelly question relates to the subjective of banking Cole's or stacking Coles I believe it's also known as and it's a concept as I'm sure you familiar with where you you stack the coals and embers at the end of the night at the end of your fire into a compact pile in the hope that the next morning when you wake up you can rake a part that that compact pile of embers and coals find a hot ember and then use that to hopefully bring some dry kindling or some dry tinder to flame making it much quicker to to restart your fire in the morning I've tried it on a couple of occasions usually

nation of pine and hornbeam a must I've got some very very hot embers at the end of the night come the next morning there's absolutely no heat left in them whatsoever the temperature ranges between sort of 5 and 10 degrees C there was no significant overnight rain at fact there was no rain at all overnight although it was December in the UK so there's a little bit of mist and fog I don't expect you to give any fault-finding

on my particular examples because clearly you weren't there and there's a lot of variables involved but I just wondered if you had any general hints tips or advice on banking calls or stacking calls to increase the likelihood have you been able to get 5 from them the next morning as always Paul a huge huge thank you for doing these ask Paul Kelly's as well as everything else that you put out into the bushcraft community you're really adding value and I'm sure everybody else appreciates it as well Cheers Paul all right so yeah sort of a multi-faceted question in some ways from Craig there with respect to how do you get some make sure you've got some embers in the morning I think is that is the summary of it I think this might be a bit of a misconception there Craig I don't know who told you that you should bank the embers I would say the best bet is to is to bank the logs if you've just got a pile of embers at the end of the night you're probably not going to have any embers in the morning if you've got some decent firewood you mentioned hornbeam and we'll differentiate between some different species hornbeam burns quite hot is quite calorific it's quite a hardwood that's what hornbeam means it means hard wood hard tree and you know it burns pretty well it's a good roasting wood you're not going to find it in many places you'll get it where you are because at the part of the world that you're in and there is home being you're not that far from where I'm recording this actually so you will them you will get hornbeam around there more broadly beech is a good one and oak is a good one in terms of producing in the first place producing good embers but also in terms of a slower combustion because that's really what you need if you've got some low you brought them together and you want them to slowly combust and you what you want wood that is going to be calorific and that is going to burn slowly unless you're really trying to blast it you don't want to be bringing fire together in a sort of star fire type of way you want to be bringing logs together where you've got at least two logs in parallel I'm not necessarily talking about doing a long log fire I'm just talking about you've got multiple you haven't just got one touch point where they're gonna burn away you've got a touch point where the one log is laying against the other one and even if one of those burns away a bit the other one's gonna follow through under there and the action of gravity so that they maintain contact and that there is a burning surface across them that's probably what you need to do having a lot of heat underneath both of those logs in the first place and yes you can start banking earth and ashen things on them but a couple of decent sized logs and you you know beech oak palm beam you know after a good you know warm fire in the evening is probably going to leave you with some embers in the morning even if it's just blowing on one of those logs and you're getting a little bit of a glow and then having to build it up from from there what I would say though all that being said is why do you want to do that and that I'm being a bit obtuse but it's it's you know it's a valid question yes it can be nice to wake up in the morning go over to your fire site blow on the embers introduce a bit of fine kindling and rekindle the fire and have your billy pot or your kettle over those flames in not very long but equally you've burnt probably a good part of two logs overnight that could have been good firewood that you're now going to have to replace and the question is would it maybe have been more economical to just put aside some materials to light your fire quickly in the morning and not burn that decent firewood that you could then use the following evening for cooking a nice stew for example if you've split it down a bit or even just kept it in the round depending on what you're trying to do so I'm not saying don't try and do that I'm just saying think about why you're doing that

now the proof one of the previous questions was about being out in a sort of survival situation particularly when you're living off the land your energy levels are going to go down and if you don't have a modern device for lighting a fire and I would include a flint and steel in that because that's a relatively modern device and if you don't have something and you're resorting to very natural means of fire lighting like bow drill or hand drill and as your energy goes down you're less likely to get that to work and you don't want to be relighting your fire in the morning and relighting your fire and you know after going out foraging for the day you want to bank it and keep it going so yes and the way that you do that is by piling up quite a bit of wood but do it in such a way that it's not going to burn very quickly and use wood that is relatively slow burning don't be using soft woods like pine pine burns away very quickly it burns away to nothing as do a lot of the soft woods and wood such as sweet chestnut which you have a lot of around where you are again and that burns quite quickly it's not it doesn't produce good embers it just burns down to ash you will almost certainly have nothing left in the morning if you're using things like pine or sweet chestnut and as I say use those are the woods like hornbeam oak and beech maybe a bit decent side willow as well and that all of those are good so there's some tips for you but again just go right back to first principles and think about do I need to do this because there are these little tropes in in bushcraft and I've noticed them particularly you know you get them echoed across different YouTube accounts where people almost copy actually there are things become vogue that we're going to do this we're going to you know you see certain types of pot hangar or tarp arrangements of hearing in lots of different places and an Instagram and you see it the same with all right I'm going to bank my fire and okay fair enough there might be very valid reasons for doing that but equally you might want to save the firewood for the next day and sometimes what we do in our camp is at the end of the when we're finished with the fire we actually spread the logs so that they burn out without consuming as if and then we bring them back into the fire in the morning so we'll you know have some kindling spark onto a bit of birch bark twigs bringing the bigger logs that they're all scorched on the end will they were light very easily and then you got your fire again without having to go and find more firewood that's another option so there we are cap Turner case this is a question via Instagram this is from Jim nice picture of an orange cat tourniquet there and he says my first aid course taught the use of combat application tourniquet and I've seen it in your kit sorry I'll read that again my first aid course taught the use of the combat application tourniquet and I haven't seen it in your kit list what's your view on this device the course was wilderness 1 but included first aid at work and forestry is this a bad idea in remote areas when instruction and Swift medical attention may not be forth coming well I don't know what they told you on that course Jim and with regards to how to use those torna case and if they've if they've taught you probably prop properly they should have told you that you can now use torna Ches and use them and as long as you release them with the correct protocols which I am NOT going to go into now yeah if you want to learn how to use them if you're watching this and you don't know how to use them and go on a course that teaches you how to use them so I'm not going to be specific about how to use them because this isn't the first-aid course it's out of context and I don't want people going away thinking that they know how to use them based on what I've said okay but the thing I will say is that when I first did first date courses back in the day the advice was don't use tourniquet torniquet is a bad you put a tourniquet on your leg you'll go black and it will drop off and that was kind of the attitude whereas now it then kind of moved to yeah but only only if you're a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan but now it's kind of moved the the the the experience of using tourniquets in those places has caused a change to filter down into more general outdoor first day training and I will say I've for many many many years carried a captain okay in my personal kit and in particular when I'm on my own in the woods using an axe or if I'm I don't use machetes or prongs very often I don't tend to do a lot of stuff in tropical areas and but there's a couple of things I carry when I'm carrying large cutting tools and and that carries on my person one is a large bandage and Israeli type bandage that has got the ability to tighten it up quite tight and I also carry a cat tourniquet if I'm doing a canoe trip on my own if I'm doing a hike maybe not so much I'll have the bandage I might not have the torniquet but generally I've got those things with me if I'm using cutting tools but under any circumstances in wild places where help is not at hand I will have those if I am on a solo journey particularly if I'm in a canoe because I tend to be using a cutting tool more on canoe trips than hiking trips for example and and if I'm just here on my own you know I'm not far away from help I'm far enough away from home that if I put an axe in my leg could be pretty serious and so yes I've carried those for a long time but it was contra to what we were being told on first day courses for for quite a while but now it's come on - first date courses and yes I do have them in my kit and we do have them in our group kits and we certainly have them in our expedition kits and so yes if you've been taught to use them and use them properly with the right protocols under what circumstances and how long you can leave them on for and marking them with times and all of those things then yes have them in your kit I think they're a very useful thing and particularly if you're on your own using a larger cutting tool where you can do yourself a major damage as it were and you could have a serious bleed having one of them on your person I think is very sensible because I mean the other thing as much as anything it's not just about the blood loss it's also about remaining functional if you're in a wild place you if you have to cut off a lot of blood loss and it's going to be hard to do it on your own but you know if I've put an axe in my lower leg I want to be able to put a tourniquet on above it and make sure that there I'm limit the blood loss even if that's just to stop myself passing out so I can get on the satphone for example so yes without going into teaching people how to use them and because frankly that's not what I do you know we do cover that on one of our courses and which I do jointly with the guy who does our first day training and so I would say if you want to learn how to use to any case and learn it on a on a relevant outdoor course as you have done Jim and I would yet recommend that they're in your kit for large cutting tool use even relatively close to home as well as going into wild places especially if you're on your own but also in your group kit they're a good thing to have and also you've showed an orange one get the orange ones and you know people like to get all tactical and buy the black ones orange ones are better because if you put them on somebody else you can see where they are the black one tends to blend in with with dark clothing we all like to wear green and blacks and dark Browns and things and the orange ones are much easier to see yeah hopefully that answers your question Jim without me giving any sort of partial advice on how to use them to anybody else

and that's not me being a knob by the way that's just me saying go and get some proper training if you want to use you want to carry and use these things okay question from Davey and this is about bow drill standing up Davey at Buzzard bushcraft and he says hi Paul and with reference to your episodes regarding fire by friction I used to be very good at getting a fire going with this method with materials I was finding when I was out but now I have arthritis in both knees and other joints and find it very painful to get into a comfortable position to practice this method and together with my pal Phil we can get an ember easily but I am wanting to get back to getting this myself is there any other way or position that you could recommend to get me back into getting my skill up to a level that I was once at is there a method that I could use standing up for exactly for example thanks in advance for your answer and as always your videos are informative and enjoyable to watch Davy was a bushcraft M well yeah you can do it standing up you have to bring you have to bring the set up to your level as it were and you know if you can find a stump like like you know I'm sitting on a tree stump at the moment new from some forestry a while ago where they're taking out some of the the spruce trees in this area the thinned-out these woods you can find a stump that you can then put the set on put your put your foot on which doesn't mean then that you're kneeling right down on the ground and you know hunched over yeah sure do that equally you know if you can find a fallen tree like there's one over there that I sometimes sit on to do these episodes again if you can get over a bow drill set the hasp or balanced on that with your leg up with the other leg straight and then you can still bear down on it I've seen people do it that way as well and that can work very nicely and so I would experiment with bringing the set up to a level where you're less hunched over that one of your leg is excuse me one of your legs is more or less straight and where your other leg is up sort of a right angles to your to your chest and that you can step on something like you're stepping up onto a high step and then you can lean forward onto it from there those that that's that's the main thing I can think of short of building really oversized sets you know which we we've done in the past with the group kind of act Tootie's and team building where you build absolutely massive bow drill sets you know big spindle in a big half board like a you know plank like a scaffolding planks or size and then a big bearing block on top and you need about five people to make it work and of course a lot of everyone's pretty much standing up but you want to do it on your own so you're gonna have to keep the scale of the set normal and be able to do that on your own I would say ya find a surface in if you're out in the woods fallen tree big log that you can get a set on and then work on work on that at that level rather than punching right right down I would say have a play with that I've certainly seen people do that and it'd be quite fruitful you still need to get the pressure on and by bearing down on it though and that that's about so don't get it too high because of the Y's you'll end up sort of leaning back rather than being able to lean into it a bit and that is that that brings us to the end of episode 70 70 of the a sport currently and we will be into the 70s now 71 will be the next episode I was born in the 70s so it's a good decade it's a good decade to be in and not a lot to really tell you about what's going on at the moment just getting back into the UK courses now springtime is just about here looking forward to seeing some of you on courses before too long and if you're interested in the courses that we do you know the school frontier bushcraft comm forward-slash courses those are our field courses you can find them all there there are places left on some of the courses this summer and all of them are quite a few than were fully booked but some of the basic bushcraft courses actually still have places on them and so if you're looking to come and get some really good solid skills with a good group of instructors then please check those out and also got a few new courses there as well so even though old hands can have a look and see if there's something new to take your fancy this year or in the future I will maybe be changing things up a bit again next year so if there's a particular course that you're looking at and the space is on it this year I would get on it because I'm changed I'm looking at changing the proportion and the way that we do certain things just you know I've been doing this a long time now and things change over time in terms of what people want and we can see that in terms of what people are booking and what people are not booking at cetera cetera so yeah we listen to we listen to what people want in terms of type of training and we try and deliver that so yeah if there are things there they've got spaces and you fancy that if you can get on it this year I would if I were you particularly if it's with me personally because again my time is getting split between lots of things these days more wilderness trips people keep asking me for more more videos more films more stuff or clearly if I'm going to teach that way using videos then my time for teaching a few people in the woods goes down as well so I've got to kind of sum up what's the best thing for me to do how should I be spending my time and there may be a few changes in how I allocate my time after 2018 in particular so yeah I would those courses won't always be there that that's a way to think about it yeah some of those some of the type of courses that I run I've been running for 15 years now

in one way or another under my own auspices or previous employers and yeah sometimes you need to step back and look at what you're doing and think okay that's that's a way of having more impact or people aren't getting that type of trait there's lots of opportunities for that type of training but there's not so lot not so much opportunity for that type of training and so we have to listen keep our ears to the ground and see what people want and how we can have the biggest impact in terms of getting skills and knowledge across to people so anyway have a look at our courses see what takes your fancy there's some new stuff there already and jump on a relevant program because there's lots of good stuff there and I'm partnering up with some really good people as well in ways that they're not those those combinations of trainings those intersections of skillsets are not available elsewhere so have a look at those and bit of a hard sell but equally and this is how I make my living I don't make my living by making us poor Kirtley videos and I make us poor Kirkley videos to try and help as many people as possible but equally I've got to let people know about the other stuff as well from time to time so please forgive me for doing that if you're not interested at all in any of that and I know a lot of you are around the world and I know some of you would like to come and do things with me but you know yeah the travel is difficult I appreciate that

but I appreciate you watching these videos and I appreciate you asking the questions please keep the questions coming and I have now managed to get through pretty much all of the backlog of corenz and had built up over the winter there aren't a lot outstanding at the moment and yeah if you want me to keep making these shows keep the questions coming in that's what they're for I'm not going to make them for the sake of it but keep the questions coming in alright take care see you on the next one bye bye [Music]

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