Survival! Easier than you think!, page 1

Welcome back to another riveting post of Survival! Easier than you think!

This is Part 3

As I promised we are going to go over the uses of some of the important gear you’ve got!

Q: Yeah so this stuff I got how is it used for survival?

A: Well Timmy this is going to be a long answer so get some cocoa and huddle up!

For practical purposes refer to my first thread for the number I will provide here and that will be the corresponding item

First and foremost is the good ol trusty #1

1 is going to be used for so many things it’s unbelievable. One of its main purposes is skinning bark off of trees for tinder. Even with the alcoholic hand sanitizer (8) you don’t want to dump a bottle of that stuff to make a fire … it’s absolutely impractical and well smells a bit weird. Collecting tinder is rather easy it really is bark or wood shavings (dry obviously) or brush that has been dried. If it has been snowing and raining and nothing is dry check your pockets for some lint. I know it sounds stupid but that pocket lint is ridiculously good tinder I mean wooosh! Hehe.

Other huge tasks include skinning and gutting fish and animals. Ahh yes skinning and gutting a fish… Well you don’t have to … truthfully you can just eat the damn thing but that is no picnic … the scales feel like little disc like crunchlets and have an incredibly gamy taste… not advised! What your going to do is take that knife and from tail to head, don’t cut just graze the surface, the scales will slowly but surely come free. Make sure you get all of them they are just plain not tasty!

Now the guttin! Use your knife and start just about where the fins are and cut towards the head. Don’t go too deep here and go straight to the gills. Now the really gross part … stick your hand in there and yank the giblets out! It’s pretty disgusting but well worth it… oh yeah and the way to tell that they are the guts? They will be attached at the fishes mouth and its butt… so yeah those are the guts. But what a sec you’re not done yet… Open that puppy up and you’ll see a few more gut like objects … the liver on the top (of the inside) and a swim bladder (white nasty blobular thing) take those out. After that cut the friggin head off (make sure to entirely remove the gills when you do this)! After a good splish splash in some water you’re
ready to cook that bad boy!

On to actually starting your fire!

Now this is a hugely important thing … without fire you’ll be cold, animals will think it’s ok to be in your camp, and forget about cooking. For gathering appropriate fire supplies you will need your 1 and 10. First thing you do is start collecting tinder… you can’t get enough of this stuff just get as much as you can, dry bark shavings splintered wood , dry brush , gather every bit you can find. After that find some low lying branches (dry branches) and use 10 to separate them from the tree, once again get a lot you never know when it’s going to rain so it’s always a good idea to stock up. As well if you can get some larger branches down go right ahead. Bring this all back to your campsite and store the tinder in a Ziploc bag and the broken down branches in the garbage bags. (it is worth noting larger branches burn longer but are harder to light so make sure to get a diverse amount of wood.)

Lighting that fire!

Hold your horses bud! What you want to do first is use your 7 to dig a hole … not a huge hole … but roughly 6ish inches deep and a foot diameter… this will keep your tinder in one place when its windy as well keep your fire from blowing out. Once that is done carefully use some of that tinder you gathered and place it in the center of the hole. Have your small sized wood splinters and your small branches ready. Light the tinder with your 9, (if you need a bit of help put a dab of your 8 on their and light it up. As the tinder starts to catch add a bit more to the top careful not to smother it… next as your tinder really gets going lay on some of those wood splinters ( and by splinters I mean twigs and such) get those splinters going nice and good and start adding small branches ( once again don’t snuff the fire out add one at a time until each catches.) now with the smaller branches alight youll have more room for error put one or two of those large branches on top and let them catch. After that your home free add a few more large branches and you’ll be cookin in no time!

Cookin with conspiracy!

Alright guys so you’ve got your fire and your scaled gutted (headless) fish, You must be wondering What the hell do I do now? Well don’t just chuck the fish into the fire all that gut pulling will be wasted! Get you’re 5 out and sit the fish open side down (at this point if you need to open it the full way its cool) into your steel bowl or if they gave you a small steel frying pan even better. Then just place the thing on top of the fire. Now I’m no chef there wont be any seasoning to speak of (unless you packed some hint hint). Well as your fish sizzles away if you opened him up he should be laying flat by now give him a turn every few minutes to avoid burning. Once he’s roughly 80pct cooked (depending on the fire 7 or 8 minutes) Take your 17 and with the pliers get a firm grasp on the pan (it will be friggin hot) and remove it from the fire and place on the ground … get an unbroken and reasonably strong stick and wrap the fish around it be real careful while make sure you can keep the fish on the stick before putting it over the fire once again… and what your doing here is just adding some good old fashioned char flavor… this step is completely unnecessary but it adds a bit of flavor if you didn’t pack some seasoning.

[edit on 20-10-2009 by conspiracyrus]