Terrain Training Tuesday: Building your Survival Kit Part 3

Part 3 begins with one of my favourite items of all time, the Compass (so important it gets a capital). These come in all shapes and sizes, it’s up to you. I have a little button compass that fits onto my watch band, that way it will never get lost and neither will I.  It's a beautiful thing.

The kit gets a bit exciting here...with the introduction of wire. Not just any wire but a wire saw. A good quality wire saw can go through wood, bone, iron, almost anything but it must have at least 8 strands of wire to be effective. In addition to this get about 3 metres of brass wire so you can make snares (Snares! How cool is that?!)

To go with all this you are going to need to be able to cut stuff. A Rambo knife may seem impressive (and that’s because it is), but a Swiss army knife is better and has all the added extras.... sorry... maybe chuck some razor blades in to make yourself feel better, these have lots of uses including gutting fish and can be magnetised and used as an improvised Compass.

Yep, it's a difficult decision....

Now, like the farmer with his twine, the survival expert is never without his parachute cord and fishing tackle. Parachute cord is extremely strong, with a breaking strain of 250 kilo, the outer layer is braided over a stranded inner layer of thinner cord. A basic fishing tackle means line, hooks and swivels, and sinkers. A float can be improvised with a cork. Then this cork, when charred, can double up to provide face and hand camouflage – useful when hunting and totally Rambo for those who feel they were compromised by the knife choice.

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Yep, the man himself...headband is optional.

So that’s about it really...for those who want to go for the more premier Survival Kit I would recommend adding water purification tablets, flares and a mini survival medical kit. Actually you should have the mini medical kit regardless...well, at leaset some bandaids, nothing sucks more than cutting yourself and not having any bandaids... and you never know who or what will be attracted by the smell of your blood...

One amusing thing I found when looking into Survival Kits was on a US site (of course) that listed packing your medication as one of the most important things to remember. Hmmm, I think there’s something in that for all of us...

Next week, packing your kit for different terrains.