“Why is that one careless match can start a forest fire, but a whole box of them is needed to start a camp fire?”
Lighting a fire in the wet jungle can be a challenge and having something to help it get going (a plastic bag or rubber inner tube) can make all the difference.
A natural alternative that is often found in the jungle is resin (know locally as damar) – it is great for firestarting as the resin vaporises as it heats up and feeds the flame giving your tinder a longer burn time. However, lighting resin on its own is very difficult (similar to trying to light a candle that has no wick) and more or less impossible if just using a firesteel.
In the video below I show how to make a waterproof, firestarter (that is easy to light with a firesteel) using resin and also do a quick test to check that my fatwood handle has not lost its ability to light from a spark over the years.
“People say that nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day” (Winnie the Pooh)
Last month a young climber died in Vietnam after falling and getting lost. He was high up a mountain and had gashed his arm and hurt his leg, however he had his mobile phone with him and called for help. Tragically by the time they found him he was dead. There haven’t been any details of the cause of death although at that altitude it could have been hypothermia.
If you become lost in the lowland jungles of Malaysia, hypothermia is not a major issue, however an inability to light a fire very much is. Not only does a fire make it easier for a search and rescue team to find you, it also allows you to purify water, cook food, make a brew, keep insects and animals at bay and, perhaps most importantly, it will keep your spirits up.
This got me thinking about how feasible it is to light a fire one-handed: with a lighter and rubber inner tube it is no more difficult than if you have both hands working; with a firesteel only marginally more difficult; but what about friction fire methods?
So I spent a day experimenting on how to set up the bow drill and make it work with one hand. It was quickly apparent that everything becomes much more difficult – carving the spindle, which normally takes less than five minutes, took much longer. With almost every task you need to replace the missing hand with some sort of mechanism to hold things in place – a bit like using a vice in a workshop – so, for example, carving the spindle is much easier if you lash one end to a small sapling and work on the protruding end and then swap it round to finish off the other end.
Then there was the problem of how to press down on the bearing block without the use of one hand. Here the trick is to create a stable structure as you are trying to do so much – one knee presses down on the parang that pins the hearth board, the other knee is used to push down on the bearing block, while you are using a lot of force to work the bow – all of which can easily send you off balance and the spindle spinning off into the bush.
In the video below you will see how I set it all up and the one thing I forgot to mention, although you can see me doing it in the video, is that I am leaning against the sapling to give myself stability. It is also for this reason that I place the spindle quite near to the sapling that I am leaning on – if you put it further along the bearing-cross-beam it all becomes less stable.
Getting a fire from a bow drill one-handed is far from impossible, but it is not easy either and is most definitely time consuming.
However, if nothing else, I hope this video will persuade you to throw another spare lighter into your pack for that unforeseen scenario where you get lost in the jungle and need to start a fire.
“There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot” (Steven Wright)
An item you commonly see in PSKs (personal survival kits) is a single loop of snare wire. For the jungle at least this is not the most useful item you could take with you and some catapult bands may well serve you better.
This may seem counter to commonly accepted survival ‘wisdom’ but there are number of reasons for this:
1. One loop of wire = one snare (not enough)
2. Rattan can be used (and is used by the Orang Asal) to make snares so there’s no need for the wire as long as you know how to process rattan into strips.
3. Snaring requires a degree of knowledge about animal behaviour (if you put the snare in the wrong place, you won’t catch anything)
4. Snaring requires you to stay in one place, whereas opportunistic hunting allows you to hunt on the move.
5. The easiest place to hunt for protein in the jungle is in the rivers and streams.
Similarly setting a fish trap (night line or twig trap) may work if you are staying in one place but is not so good if you are on the move…. and don’t forget that a fish hook is only as good as the bait you put on it (and fish can be frustratingly picky about what they eat!)
Even in small streams in the jungle you usually find fish and, because the water isn’t too deep, it is relatively easy to catch them (either by hand or with a spear/arrow). The Orang Asal will walk up stream in a line towards a pool, frightening the fish in their path forward and then, once the fish are all in the same place, pick them off one by one.
However, to get close enough to the fish to spear them is a bit tricky and you need to stay very still. move very slowly and be patient….but it can be done and, as my Orang Asal friend Sammy explained to me, the best time to do this is between 8pm-midnight when the fish are, as he described it “bodoh” (Malay for ‘stupid’).
Making some sort of speargun is quite straightforward and, as long as you can find some bamboo, it’s easier than building a bow fishing kit. A speargun also has the advantage that it is less bulky, doesn’t require any movement to load (as it’s preloaded) and allows you to get closer to the fish – e.g. you can crouch in the stream and submerge the arrow tip under water (which is more difficult to do with a bow and arrow).
In a jungle survival situation streams and rivers are the obvious place to look for protein – fish, prawns, crabs, frogs are all there – and a couple of catapult bands will greatly increase your chances of being able to catch something for dinner. Also worth mentioning is another PSK item that can be very useful: a mozzi head-net which can double up as a small net to catch prawns.
There are other uses for these rubber bands – as waterproof fire starters, to make a head torch band and to fashion a compression bandage. Useful things indeed!
” A mind is like a parachute; it doesn’t work if it isn’t open” (Frank Zappa)
Imagine you go for a day hike and get lost in the jungle. By early afternoon you accept that you aren’t getting home that day and prepare for an unplanned night in the jungle. As you look for a stream to camp by, the afternoon rains give you a soaking. Maybe you didn’t bring a pack with you but you do have your trusty parang, knife and firesteel hanging from your belt. You rig-up a makeshift shelter and prepare yourself for a night in the jungle.
As the daylight fades, what frame of mind would you be in? Frustrated? – Miserable? – Worried? – Scared?
Something that is guaranteed to lift your spirits is a fire, so you pull out your firesteel and…
…and what? There’s no easy to find dry tinder – the rain and humidity keep everything moist – maybe you fire showers of sparks onto some dead, wet leaves, or damp bark scrapings to absolutely no avail whilst cursing those TV commercials that promised a firesteel “lights a fire every time, no matter what the conditions” and wishing you had a lighter instead.
Many people overrate firesteels – with very dry tinder or any of the (many) possible artificial tinders, firesteels work like magic. Almost anyone can pick up a firesteel and quickly produce lots of hot sparks …“and if I can get sparks I can get fire, right?”
The answer to that is ‘it depends’: it depends on your technique, your knowledge of where to find good tinder material and your skill at preparing the tinder. This is the heart of the problem – the firesteel is a deceptive tool that appears to need almost no skill or training to use whereas (in difficult conditions at least) that’s exactly what’s required.
For a long time I decided it wasn’t even worth carrying a firesteel as a secondary firestarting tool (preferring a back-up lighter instead). It was a reluctant decision as the firesteel has one key advantage that I really appreciate – it is robust: you can attach it to your parang sheath and more-or-less forget about it until it’s needed. The other reason this was a reluctant decision was that, and let’s be honest here, firesteels are a satisfying and fun way of lighting a fire. I enjoy using them.
What changed my mind? Well, as it happens, making this video was the catalyst as I set four tests that, if the firesteel could pass, would justify re-evaluating it as a jungle survival tool.
The thinking behind the tests was this:
Rubber inner tube test: Inner tube is something I always carry, it burns when wet and has a good burn time (but is very smelly!).
But what if, for whatever reason, I didn’t have any inner tube? The first thing I would look for is bamboo.
Bamboo shavings test: Dead bamboo keeps (relatively) dry thanks to its outer skin. Lighting up shavings is reasonably easy as long as you prepare them properly. You might think I am overstating the need for preparation of this tinder but all I can say is that I have watched many, many people fail to light up bamboo shavings and that there is a big difference between sun-dried bamboo that you find in clearings and the more damp bamboo you find in the jungle.
What if there is no bamboo around?
Feather stick test: At the the core of large enough branches you should find dry wood (unless the whole branch has started to rot) so here is a potential source of dry tinder in wet conditions. I decided not to use ‘ideal’ wood but rather pick a branch more-or-less at random and use that for the test.
Charred materials test: if you were in a real survival situation and managed to light your first fire with one of the methods above, the rest should be plain sailing. Why? Simply because you now have the ability to make charred materials: charcloth willl light up with a single spark and old firedogs can be restarted with a bit of effort (and a lot of blowing!)
The revelation for me was to discover that firesteels can light up inner tube. I had dismissed the possibility of this after a few earlier attempts but was galvanized into retrying the method after hearing of Jim’s (a Canadian friend who was in Malaysia for while….thanks Jim!) success with this tinder. After a bit of experimenting I found a method that worked for me and happily accepted that the firesteel had now passed all four tests and promptly attached one to my parang sheath.
If you think you may, one day, have to rely on a firesteel in a jungle survival situation, then I would encourage you to try these tests for yourself (or devise your own tests). Even if you fail, at least you will know in advance… rather than it being an unpleasant discovery on a rainy night somewhere deep in the jungle…and remember that, with practice, what you can’t do today you will be able to do in time.
It is easy to get caught up in “what-if” paranoia when planning a trip to the jungle: “What-if I only have a magnifying glass to start a fire and it’s a cloudy day?”, “What if both my arms get chewed off by a tiger?…how then to use my lighter?” etc etc.
The truth is that we can’t plan for every eventuality, however, the more methods of fire lighting that you master, the better your chances are of finding a suitable one for the situation you are in.
For example, if I was lost in the jungle without a lighter and come across a nice piece of dry, soft-wood (and assuming I had boot laces), then I would make a bow-drill set – as that way I can start multiple fires without much effort – if I don’t have boot laces (for the bow string) I could try the fire-thong method instead (see video below). If I can’t find dry, soft wood and there’s bamboo around then I can use the bamboo fire saw.
If you know how to light a fire without a lighter/match/firesteel (or other man-made fires starters), then you are going to be more confident about being in the jungle – a lot of those “what-if” worries will disappear – and you’ll enjoy yourself more.
…saying that, I always carry two lighters and inner tube with me, simply because it’s the easiest way of starting a fire.
The other reason it is useful to learn different friction-fire techniques is that you find that it becomes easier with each new method mastered – it’s almost like muscle memory – and you develop a feel for how fast to go or how much pressure to exert.
And the final reason is… well, it’s a lot of fun to do!
