At the Helm

I've just passed my final assessment for becoming a full inshore helmsman for the RNLI. I'm well chuffed.

It's a difficult balance between wanting to lead a service on the sea and hoping that nobody gets into enough trouble to need us. Thankfully, most of the shouts we get are people cut off by the tide or boats needing a tow and are generally not life threatening.

Don't forget to keep an eye on the tide when walking on the coast. Tide timetables are available locally and also online. They are different by region, so one for Brighton is no good for Blackpool. Google will provide you with a relevant link. Note also that times for high and low tide change daily and tide height, and hence speed of change, also changes, so the tide profile from one week will be significantly different to the next. Weather can have a significant effect too.

If you should get cut off by the tide, phone 999 immediately and ask for the Coastguard. These guys manage the cliff teams, lifeboats and choppers. We'd much rather come out early than late. Don't try to climb dangerous cliffs and don't try to swim out of trouble, you may get caught in a rip tide and taken out to sea.

Keep calm, get as high as you can safely and make yourself obvious to anyone who comes. They may be arriving from the sea, the air or from the land, so you need to be visible from all of these if you can do so safely.

Be as specific as you can when describing your emergency. Include your position, number of people, clothing and ages, if significant. Include any medical issues, including such things as dehydration, hypothermia, sprained ankles or specific medical conditions such as diabetes, heart condition or pregnancy. If you intend to move from your present position, be as specific as you can describing your intentions.

Remember, rescue starts when they know you are in trouble and starts looking where they think you are. The earlier you call and the more accurate you can be with your location, the more quickly you can be found.

If you don't know where you are, any information is good information. An example might go along the lines of:

"We're looking out to sea and the sun is directly in front of us. There is a lighthouse on a rock to my right. There is a big red tanker going from left to right a long way away. We left Bucks Mills an hour ago heading for Westward Ho! We passed some red cliffs half an hour ago and we're in a cove with a rocky beach. The cliffs are very steep. The tide is about 20 metres away and we intend to climb the rocks to a safe ledge which is about eight feet off the beach".

This will give the coastguard and lifeboat crew a significant chance of pinpointing your position, even though it doesn't contain any accurate distances, bearings or times.

On a final note, if you should manage self rescue, do let the coastguard know. Don't be embarrassed that you may have wasted their time, they would much rather you have call and they not be needed than the opposite.

I remember a particular shout where a man had been cut off by the tide. We searched for two hours before finding out that he had long since made it off the coast and to the pub where he was enjoying a pint.

Mutter mutter!

Disengage, Parry, Lunge

I've just managed to find the time to watch the first episode of Bruce Parry's new series Arctic with Bruce Parry which is being shown on BBC 2 and likely, unless you're reading this much later than I wrote it, to be on BBC iPlayer (tm). I first got into Bruce Parry with the TV Series Tribe which is absolutely excellent. I have the DVD box set and it regularly comes out for a rewatch. I found his next series Amazon quite hard going, but this new one seems to be getting back to his old style.

I'm constantly astounded by his apparent innocence and naivety, which seems odd for an ex-marine, but let's face it, if he went into a tribe of potential cannibals acting like Bear Grylls, he'd have probably been in a stew long ago. Can you imagine Bear's poor cameraman in the next pot? Bruce seems to have a knack for getting involved and is not scared to try anything, be it labour, a pint of blood, the local brew of fermented misc or the shaman's lotions & potions, some of which look quite harrowing.

Bruce is a friend of a friend of mine who met him near to where he lives in Ibiza. Apparently he's quite a party animal. He's also hung like a horse, I hear, and if you've watched his first documentary he did, First Contact - Cannibals and Crampons, which Bruce and his mate shot, you'll find a funny bit in there about that. C&C is a real eye opener in terms of the sorts of things that can go wrong if you're unprepared, which they both were. It's worth a watch and is part of the bonus features of the Tribe box set.

It's nice to watch a series dedicated to the Arctic which is not, at least initially, plastered in snow. It's quite normal for southerly regions within the Arctic Circle (66° 33' N) to have summer temperatures up to 10 °C (50 °F). Certainly, where I was in Finland, the land was lush in the summer. It was shocking for growing veg, but excellent walking. There was a pretty nasty midge issue during the thaw which caused such a problem with the huskies that they were transported to Helsinki until it all froze up again.

In a prolonged Arctic survival situation, the seasonal changes in temperature can be extreme and change can come quickly, so ensure you are prepared to move if you need to. Remember also that the temperature on the coast can be vastly different to that of inland regions. In the summer, inland regions may be warmer, but as winter comes, the coast is the place to be. Don't head in a northerly direction to get to the sea though, because as we know, it gets colder the further north we go (in this part of the world) and that would be counter productive. Watch out for those insects too, they can really spoil your day.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the series which is likely to get a lot chillier and I hope, one day, to meet the man himself. I think I'll have a look and see if he's doing a tour soon. Oh, his website is buggered. Ho hum.

Figure Four Deadfall Trap

It's a rubbish trap for tons of reasons, but I made one as an exercise with the the chaps from Natural Bushcraft on one of the meets some time ago and it appears that someone has made a page about it:

http://fromtheold.com/steve-marvells-figure-four-deadfall-trap

I'm so proud :)

Here's the original video:

Night Owls

You may have noticed that my posts often come late at night. Why is this, you may ask yourself. The reason is simple, my day consists of tasks which have specific or limited time frames. Meals times, school runs, phone calls, house work and even socialising fall into prescribed parts of the day. Writing is not subject to a particular time and hence finds itself slotting into the first available period outside those which are bounded.

This is also the case with certain actions and operations in a survival context. Darkness imposes a massive impeding factor on most things you want to do outside. In the RNLI, we say that everything to do with Search and Rescue in the dark takes around eight times as long as it would in daylight. I don't know if you've tried even going for a pee in the dark in the woods with no torch, but you can image it's an absolute pain with all the roots and brambles just waiting to trip or ensnare you. Imagine now, trying to build a shelter, locate dry firewood or collect water in the depths of night with no light source. These are the sorts of thing you want to do in daylight, when they are far easier.

What we are toying with now are the kinds of decision which represent the macroscopic prioritisation needed when applying the high level rules of managing a survival situation. It is generally accepted, outside of the certain arctic and tropical areas, that shelter is the first priority after managing further danger and injury. This is a simple application of a 'what will kill me first' rule; the elements are going to have you, so protect yourself from them. On courses, we generally start the day at 10:00am and there is much daylight to begin building a shelter, fire, consider signals, locate water and maybe even some food. Take a moment to consider how this situation might be altered if we started at 6:00pm, in the rain, in January. Here, knowing how our bodies can survive wet over cold, we might prioritise firewood and simply keep ourselves warm through the night until morning, when daylight once again gives us the opportunity to work more effectively.

Again and again, I have seen clients fritter away the time they have before useful daylight has passed. In the woods, this is easily an hour before that of open ground, but even with this warning, I have seen countless cups of tea brewed whilst firewood piles lay wanting or shelter roofs remain unfinished. This is partly naivety and a bad estimation of the duration of critical tasks, part knowing that this is a course and nobody is going to die, but mainly a lack of prioritisation of operations for which night time has a limiting factor. On longer courses, certainly ones in the winter months, this soon changes after beauty sleep is interrupted by cold or rain. All of a sudden, the benefit of that immediate cuppa pales into insignificance compared to the fatigue and discomfort associated with a damp, fireless night.

Never underestimate the amount of time it takes to perform such tasks as building even temporary shelter, lighting a fire or collecting wood. I noted on a recent course that even with a fire steel, lighting fires after dark, when the air was cold and riddled with moisture, was significantly harder than an hour before the sunset. Use your time wisely, it is a resource like any other and deserves to be used efficiently. Once established with shelter and fire, times of darkness, cold and even rain can still be used effectively for such tasks as water treatment, cooking, bedding construction, tool or cordage making and if you have a Bushcraft bent, spoon carving.

If you find yourself in a genuine survival situation, and I hope you never do, consider the effects of darkness when formulating your initial plan. Use your available daylight effectively and think about what you can still do in partial or fire light. If nothing else, this will save any torch batteries you have, but ultimately may make all the difference to you getting out alive.