question on water
- Thread starter Beardyal
- Start date
To me Bushcraft is about being able to exist in your surrounding environment without suffering undue hardship. Yes water procurement and treatment is a key to that, but it is dependant on your environment. If you are in London, you don't try filtering the thames, you ask for a glass of water in starbucks.
The same is true on the Canal, don't even bother trying to filter the water in the canal. That is well above the threshold of acceptable risk for any sane person. Even with activated Carbon filters and a Sawyer 0.01 micron unit. You have absolutely no idea what might be in that canal. Sure the local water board filters some ropey sources and makes them drinkable, but they have a filter unit that costs substantially more than the pocket money of a Sawyer mini, *AND* more importantly, the ability to test the output to check what they are doing is working. On the bank of a canal the water might taste OK, but 10 days later when the trip is over you find yourself in A&E.
As has been said at length, most canals have a selection of pubs along the route and you can probably ask to fill your water bottles up there. My general approach in these situations is to hobble in (I never seem to arrive in said pubs in full bounce), pitch up on a stool at the bar, order a drink, chat to the bar staff, just small talk "nice weather, great location", and then ask if they would mind filling up my water bottle. Never had a pub say no.
Water procurement has been a problem on a number of my trips. On [thread=137365]one trip[/thread] last summer, despite drinking over 6L, I came dangerously close to injury as a result of hyperthermia and dehydration. You might be able to walk all day in winter on 1L of water, but on a hot summers day, you really do need to keep properly hydrated and that can mean 4L plus.
In your planning, check the locations of pubs and shops along the route, check also that they are open when you are planning to be going by, many a country pub may not be open at 4 in the afternoon...
Also to bear in mind, many churches have an outdoor tap so that people can water the plants they leave on graves (tho annoyingly on one trip recently, the church I found didn't). This can be useful. And of course, you may have luck knocking on the door of a house and asking nicely if they would mind filling up your water bottle (I consider this a last resort usually).
Finally, while the water in the canal should be avoided, the stuff that flows into it might be usable with a filter. Check on the map where it's coming from, check the area for dead livestock etc... You may be lucky and find a small stream that's trickling out of a spring on a bank into the canal. Don't forget that OS 1:25k maps tend to mark Springs on them. You can't rely on them always being there when you get there, but it's another option to consider.
It really is an option of last resort.
It kinda reminds me of the River Ankh... where you can chalk the outline of a body onto the surface without fear that it will disappear...
Do still take a water filter, the Sawyer mini water filter is very light, and is a useful backup for "just in case" situations (even if I wouldn't use it to filter the actual canal).
Finally, don't forget that if you're using meals that need water to rehydrate to take this into account in your how much water maths. Between a main meal and a desert, you can easily do 0.5L to rehydrate a meal. Stick in a mug of tea with that and you're on your way to a litre. Then you have breakfast the next morning...
Water is complex.
J
Food and food/personal hygiene was also on my list. We're taking some of the GF's, brother's old army rations along for the ride, with a view to cooking up wild edibles, fingers crossed.
I'll take a look at getting one of those filters. Keeping an eye out for water sources leading in to the canal is a great idea, I'll go through the map when we have one for the route, we're still getting on to our OS maps because most of my outdoors skills up to now, have been practiced in our garden haha! Land access and the law have been putting me off massively.
I'll take a look at getting one of those filters. Keeping an eye out for water sources leading in to the canal is a great idea, I'll go through the map when we have one for the route, we're still getting on to our OS maps because most of my outdoors skills up to now, have been practiced in our garden haha! Land access and the law have been putting me off massively.
While you may be able to supplement your lunch with a handful of black berries (at the right time of year), or maybe add a little wild garlic to the pot to enliven the freeze dried mush. Trying to forage, and travel at the same time is generally ill advised. Do one, or the other, don' try both. You just can't make enough headway whilst looking out for stuff to eat. Not to mention that in the UK environs it's really hard to come up with a calorific enough meal to feed you for a days hike.
On a days hike you can easily push 3000-4000 calories of energy expenditure. To put that in perspective. An apple is something like 50 calories. So to put in 4000 calories worth of foraged apples, you would need to eat 80. Obviously your body has some reserves to call upon, but even if you work on the RDA for men of 2500 calories, you're still looking at 50 apples. Obviously you're not going to want to get all your calories from one source, and eating even 50 apples is going to get boring fast. So where do you go for other sources? Well nuts are the obvious one, they tend to be very energy dense. Chestnuts and Hazelnuts are the most common, but again, you're gonna need a lot. Google tells me that 14 hazelnuts is 88 calories. Chestnuts have a lower energy density of 131 calories per 100g. You're gonna need a lot of nuts to keep you going... Not to mention their relatively narrow season... Oh and wild greens? Sure they are edible and very nutritious in terms of Vitamins and Minerals, but their energy density is so low as to be essentially empty (14 calories per 100g for wild rocket...)
The logical option then is to look at non vegetable based food sources. Assuming it's the UK, you're unlikely to have permission to hunt along the tow path (nor is it going to be a good idea to take a shot gun along said tow path...). But you could fish in the canal. Keeping and eating fish from the canal is frowned upon by many, and you have all the same issues of water toxicity with the added fun and games of bio-accumulative toxins... But a pike has an energy density of 113 calories per 100g, but it does tend to come in larger pieces than 100g...
What this is a rather long winded way of saying is that by all means pick some blackberries as you walk by a bush, and such like. But don't plan on foraging as you go as your main source of sustenance. Forage, or travel, don't try both.
If you are buying OS maps and don't have any already, get the laminated ones, the extra couple of quid per map is worth it, and of course you don't have to worry about someone putting their pint down on your map when planning the route in the pub...
J
I'd say that the above is very good advice indeed. Getting by when you have a base camp and permission to take whatever you can get hold of from your surroundings is one thing, but the law will stop you from doing this along your route. Stick to carrying food, and maybe pub lunches!
In a true survival situation you'd get a long way on duck, fish and the roots of bulrush, livened up with wild greens. But in reality you cannot simply take those, or at least not the game. It may be worth talking to the angling clubs along the route though - I spend a bit of time helping my dad bank clear on his club's local stretch and I'm sure they would be ok with you pulling out the odd bulrush. Pulling out something that's starting to intrude into the peg areas as maintenance would probably please them greatly if you were to explain what your plans are and that you won't wreck anything before actually doing it. It could also be worth questioning their policy on zander - a lot of fisheries have a non return policy for these invasive and very destructive fish. If you could target those then you may well have a legal source of fish too, although it will of course depend on local stocks.
Last of all good luck. I wish my wife enjoyed this sort of thing. She's a fussy eater - there's no way in hell I'd get away with feeding her anything like that!
Having been a H&S advisor on quite a few water treatment plants, I can attest that most of the ones I visited use slow sand filtration (with an activated charcoal layer) followed by either chlorine or ozone dosage. Some use UV, Alum or Iron salts to help with coagulation/flocculation (get the big bits out) before the filtration step. Slow sand filtration is a biological action as the schmutzdecke layer (a kind of thin algal layer on the top of the sand) does all the killing of pathogens. Until that layer builds up, all you're doing is clarifying the water. SSF's are better suited to more permanent installations with storage tanks due to their low flow rates. Still the most cost effective way of obtaining safe potable water as you only have to scrape a few mm off the surface to renew (once the schmutzdecke has built up again). Not really a portable solution though.
Thanks guys! I'll be getting a key for those sheds along the canal as well as depending on the kindness of others, after all, that's what travel is about, right? XD
My girlfriend is also a fussy eater, but I'm working on it, she even has her first knife now though so it's looking good. We're taking a foraging course this month and taking food to be supplemented by foraged food as advised by Quixoticgeek. Just a question of packing what gear where now which is a whole new world of questions
My girlfriend is also a fussy eater, but I'm working on it, she even has her first knife now though so it's looking good. We're taking a foraging course this month and taking food to be supplemented by foraged food as advised by Quixoticgeek. Just a question of packing what gear where now which is a whole new world of questions
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