Your real life survival situation?

[Landy_Dom]

Hi All

I write this with Scouts in mind.

I'm sure many of us have read through the SAS survival handbook and similar tomes... And many of us will have at one time thought about worst case "survival situations" involving plane crashes, desert islands, lost in the Canadian North woods etc.

Now in my opinion such situations are rare indeed, and when one does encounter a real life "survival situation" it is rarely as we imagine or plan it. As I teach my scout troop the importance of survival skills, I ponder what sort of situations arise in ordinary British life that require the use of learnt and practised survival skills?

One example would be people stranded / trapped in their cars in this mental weather - but my question to you all is - what real life survival situations have you been thown into and how prepared were you? what kit did you have? what kit did you WISH you'd had? How did you cope?

I think teaching survival skills means a whole lot more when backed up by real life examples of ordinary people in their own country.

One example from me would be climbing Snowdon in spring with a mate - both fit and both experienced. On the top of Crib Goch the mists closed in and the rain lashed us horizontally. We had waterproof tops but not bottoms and we had limited warm clothing, because the weather at the base was gorgeous. I remember thinking if we don't keep our heads here we're in real danger of hypothermia. If we'd have had one of those orange bothy bag shelters we'd have been laughing.

So what's your stories?

Dom.

 

[Graham_S]

There is one that springs to mind.
It happened when I was in the RAF.
I was training for ten tors.
I was leading a team on a training weekend on Dartmoor and the weather took a very nasty turn for the worse.
One of the lads started exhibiting classic hypothermia symptoms.
We were at least a couple of hours from any civilization.
I had a look at the map and realised that we were about 1/2 a mile from a hut we'd used as a checkpoint on a previous weekend, so we made for it.
Once there I lit the pot bellied stove that was there with the hexi blocks from our rat packs, got a brew on, and got him out of his wet clothes, into his sleeping bag, and started feeding him hot chocolate.
We planned out our route to get back to the base camp for the next morning and settled down for the night.
We were picked up by the rescue team about 2 in the morning.

I would have liked decent comms so we could have let people know what was happening, I would have also liked better clothing for the team to prevent the whole situation from happening in the first place.

The lesson I took away from it was to pay attention to what's going on around you.
try to spot problems while they are still solvable.
If you keep your wits about you you can stop things becoming a survival situation.

 

[Landy_Dom]

At the time I told my scouts the most likely contenders were exposure / hypothermia in winter, and dehydration / heatstroke in summer. Building shelters and trapping food is unlikely to get a look in. Like you say - a little knowledge, some basic kit and keeping a cool head goes a long way.

 

[Gotte]

Not exactly stranded in the artic, but my friend and I were on the moors in the Peak District, looking for the wrecks of WW2 aircraft. We's been out about an hour or two, gone right off track, purposefully, and were attempting to navigate via map and compass to a point where we knew a wreck to be (from another book - we hadn't been there before. As always happened, the weather descended - not rain, but low cloud as thick as a pea soup fog. We could hardly see our hands before our faces. All the landmarks disappeared. We followed a bearing, but the feature on the map wasn't there. We walked some more, came across a feature that shouldn't have been there.
Suddenly we realised we were lost. What was worse, though, was that we both had differing ideas about how to get back on track. We talked it over but couldn't resolve it. We were both sure we were right. We didn't fall out, but we were both sure the other's idea was wrong. That was where we both started to feel a slight panic. There was a realisation that we could quite easily get really lost. The weather could close in, and we could be out there overnight (it was winter and a time before either of us had mobile phones). We scouted around a little, and then luckily came across a faint path. We figured the path would lead us somewhere, and followed it. Amazingly, it lead us straight to the crash site we were looking for. The weather lifted a little, and we saw the path leading off across the moor to a feature in the distance we recognised.
I suppose we were never in real danger, as we would probably have just tracked back in the general direction we'd come. But we had climbed a few outcrops on the journey up, and it would have been quite easy to take a tumble going down.
Like I said, it wasn't the most dreadful wilderness situation, but it was a good lesson in just how quickly you can become lost and disorientated when the weather closes in.

 

[ged]

I built a house in Oxfordshire. The roof timbers were supported on steel beams so that I could extend into to loft space if I ever wanted to (I never did). Putting the steel beams in place was a bit of a laugh, some of them were seven or eight metres long and about 18 inches deep so they were pretty heavy. So I called in my mates from the judo club. One of the guys was a big bruiser by the name of Bruce. One of the beams had to go over the living room, and we had some pallets stacked at one end of it and a ladder at the other. Grahame, Jim and I got hold of one end of the beam and heaved it up onto the pallets, while Bruce got the other end on his shoulder and climbed up the ladder. It was a wooden ladder, and it made some creaking noises, but it held, and the beam was put in place without incident.

The next day I was three-quarters of the way up to the roof on the ladder, with a bucket of mortar in one hand, when the ladder snapped clean in two. I'm a lot lighter than Bruce plus half of a steel beam, so why it chose to break then, and not the day before, I'll never know.

Now I was always careful about tying the top of the ladder to the scaffolding, and I found myself hanging in the air holding a rung of the ladder with one hand, still clutching the bucket in the other. I dropped the bucket, hauled myself up the bit of the ladder that I still had hold of, and suffered no injury at all. If I hadn't tied that ladder at the top, things might have been very different.

Take precautions, don't push things too hard.

 

[R3XXY]

I once found myself in a bit of a hairy situation. I had just swapped my snugpak softie 3 for a military arctic bag and wanted to try it out, it was the right time of year being in the middle of winter.
There was only person who was available and up for coming along, but he didn't have much in the way of kit (a duvet, four beers and a jack russell), so I lent him my poncho and basha to make himself a makeshift two layer bivi bag and he made himself a raised bed from logs and spruce boughs to insulate himself from the ground. He was a tough enough sort of lad, into potholling and had been in the army for a short while so I thought he'd be ok.
We collected LOADS of firewood, mostly Birch and made a long fire and slept next to it.

About three hours after we'd turned in he asked me in a rather ill sounding voice if the fire was still in, I had a look and replied that it wasn't, he said "I thought so I'm f$%&!in freezing !" and sat up in his bed, he started coughing and retching and was shaking uncontrollably.
I had to jump out of my bag, put my hat and coat on him over the top of the ones he had on and then rush around like a madman collecting dead twigs from the bottom branches of the Oak And Pine tress around the camp area while he sat and tried to cough his lungs out of his mouth.

All that was left of the fire was a glowing ember about the size of my thumb, it took me a good half hour of frantic non stop wood gathering and blowing to get a self sustaining fire going, with everything being damp in the english winter, then I chucked on the rest of the wood we had and got a proper big blaze going to thaw the poor chap out.

We packed up and went home after he'd warmed up enough.

He was definitely going hypothermic, it's a good job he woke up or I might have woken up to a stone cold corpse. He sent me a text the next day to thank me for getting on it so quickly and getting the fire going, said I'd daved his llife. I / we shouldn't have let the situation arise in the first place though.

That's the closest shave and most valuable lesson I've ever had whilst out having adventures.

 

[forestwalker]

The most likley situation is, as others have said, getting lost on a day-hike (picking berrier, fungi, whatever). One of those fogs you people have, for example. Day hike, so no camping gear.

One could also turn an ankle while out, makes is a wee bit hard to walk out even if one knows the way.

As manu here has found out, once you have skills you don't really have "survival situations" (try asking Ray Mears/Lars Fält/Mors Kochanski; I bet they'll say pretty much the same). You end up spending an extra night or two out, you have to use another navigational trick to find your way back, you have to stop and make a fire to dry your clothes (or at least warm up a bit and change into the dry set) because you went through the ice, etc. But it is not a survival situation, it is more of a "bushcraft moment".

What I would tell the scouts, after explaining what was most likley to happen and how unlikely the "classic" scenarios are (there should be statistics from the SAR people on causes and durations), would be to ask them one question: "if you ended up i that kind of situation, what would you like/need to have with you?". Then you compare that with "what would you actually bring on a day hike?". Make them think about tossing a spare sweather, beanie and poncho into the day pack, about having a FC rod as their key fob, etc. That kind of things will get done, and that is what will help them in real life situations.

 

[oldtimer]

Two young sons, Easter, Peak District. Sudden, unexpected cold snap and heavy snowfall. No chance of moving safely. Well equipped so safely sat storm out for three days in tents. Physical needs well met but oh, the boredom of it. Now I never move without a crossword puzzle book in my survival kit.

 

[mclark]

we were training in the brecons a couple of winters ago , the fog had came down very fast and you couldnt see 5 yards in front of you and one of the lads fell down an overhang and broke his leg , as we couldnt get a chopper in due to the weather we had to sit it out with him while the platoon commander set back off on the 25 km trek back to the harbour area to get to the bowman (radio ) to try and organise a SAR ( search and reascue ) we ended up sitting there for 3 days with no water replen and no food replen so we had to make the most of what we had in our webbing which was mostly ammo but when combined we had enough kit to look after ourselves and sort out our lad with the broken leg until the chopper could get to us

 

[BarryG]

I once woke up completley blind. Turned out i'd fell asleep, whilst drunk, in someones coal bunker. Once i worked out i was alive, and not blind, it took ages to get out. I was midly hypothermic and soooo very ill....

Cant say ive ever had a major drama out in the big wide world, other than being lost a few times.