How I Survived a Night Outdoors With 3 Tools and a Book
*Ok, Ray Mears wasn’t really there and he definitely is not a tool. He was the author of the book I had with me. His Outdoor Survival Handbook would hopefully have all the tricks and knowhow to enable me to survive a night in the woods without many of the things I would normally take camping.
No tent. No bivvy. No roll mat. No sleeping bag. No idea!
I’m convinced that you only need a few things to have a wonderful adventure. There are people who bemoan the fact that all the equipment costs so much but I want to prove that you only need a few things to have an awesome adventure.
Here is a list of things that I brought with me:
- Clothes - Boxers, thick socks, zip off trousers (only the cool kids wear these), t-shirt (white was a mistake!), 2 fleeces, ski jacket, snood.
- Tools - Flint and steel (never used one before. Eek!), multi-tool (inc. saw blade and pen knife) and headtorch (didn’t use it).
- Filming equipment – DSLR camera, tripod, iPhone, lav mic (+ waterproof bag for filming equipment)
- Book – Ray Mears – Outdoor Survival Handbook
Ray’s book was immensely helpful but it does have some peculiar chapters. It gives a whole chapter to the art of telling a story and a diagram of how to use every part of a moose. Not really essential for survival in a woodland in Dorset.
I think another area that the book could be improved was a list of the order in which to complete tasks. I really didn’t know where to start so started with the most fun thing first, making a fire.
I followed Ray’s instructions to the T but the tinder he suggested (dried bracken) was bloody useless. To be fair it was probably my £2 impulse buy flint and steel at the counter in Go Outdoors which was crap. It was only when I used a strip of birch bark and my brother, Ed’s, superior magnesium flint did the first sparks really start to fly.
Did I not mention that I was camping with my brothers? Oops.
Yeah, I was camping with them and no they weren’t doing the whole survival thing. And no I didn’t cheat and eat their copious amounts of food, even though they’d completely brought way more food than a normal human being needs to eat in a week. And no I didn’t use any of their utensils.
Apart from the flint and steel, of course.
You know that feeling that you get when you light the first BBQ of the year and it catches and you feel like you are the god of fire, that you are reconnecting to your caveman ancestors and you are a superior human being able to survive a zombie apocalypse. Well, take that feeling and times by about 100 and that is what it feels like to light a fire with a flint and steel after 20 minutes of trying. Boo yeah!
Once the fire was blazing I turned my attention to my sleeping arrangements. There was no way that I was sleeping on the floor so I made a bed of sticks and lay a whole load of leaves on it, just like big Ray told me to. It was actually surprisingly comfy.
Next I constructed a shelter of sticks and covered that with more fronds of leaves. I got a bit bored of building this and in the end it looked a bit like a child had thrown a wobbly in a hedge.
Next my thoughts turned to food and water. Being ultra-careful I created some nettle string out of the long stems of nettles. This, combined with a feather hook and a rock would be my fishing line for the evening. I went down to the river and plopped it in the shallows.
Water was a serious issue too. According to Mr. Mears, I needed to make a birch bark bowl, which is a mouthful to say. It would have only been a mouthful anyway as the only clean birch bark I could find was about the size of a small envelope.
No luck with the fishing line either.
Bugger!
So I went to bed hungry while my other brother, Rob, made his campfire speciality of beer can chicken by shoving a can of lager up a chicken’s arse and steaming it over the fire. It smelt delicious! They’d even caught some crayfish in a trap in the stream and had boiled them and sucked the sweet flesh out of the claws. Instead, I lay down on my ski jacket which I had placed on my bed of sticks and pulled the snood over my eyes and went to sleep.
I actually slept really well and didn’t wake until about 3 in the morning when I rolled over, stoked the fire up and fell back asleep again. The fire kept me warm (it was a balmy 19 degrees anyway) and the smoke from the fire kept all the buggies away.
Ed, who was wild camping close by, said that he had to get up in the night to shoo a badger away but I must have slept straight through it.
The next morning I had accidentally somehow set my stupid new international Casio watch to Paris time. I was wide awake at what I thought was 6.30 but must have been 5.30. I soon had the fire merrily burning away and made bacon sandwiches for my 2 brothers.
And one for myself.
Yeah, ok. But I was bloody starving and I’d had no food for breakfast. Those flipping fish hadn’t bitten at all and I had no water to boil up the nettle soup I was looking forward to. Also, the blackberries that I had planned to scavenge were all tiny and green (despite all the ones round me at home already being ripe and fat). I think I pretty much failed on the food front.
But I had survived. I’d survived one night with limited tools and just my cunning (ok, Ray Mears knowledge) to get me through. Cheers Ray Mears.
If I was going to do it again I would definitely ditch the torch. I barely used it. But I would be certain to have a mess tin or something that I could use to collect water and cook with. It was the only thing that held me back from being a true survivor.
And then my cousin, Tom, who turned up on the Sunday, showed me how to eat nettles raw and I realised it wasn’t a mess tin I needed but more knowledge. Still, you live and learn.
I wonder if you could dispense with one or two of the things that you think are essential for your next camping trip. Go on, leave something at home and see how much of an impact it has on your adventure! Have fun!
