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Bushcraft Weekend (Day 3)

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[This is a continuation from DAY 1 & DAY 2 ]

It’s the last day of the weekend.  Aside from the horrible rain last night, which finally let up around about 3am, it’s been a fantastic weekend.  I don’t know when I got to sleep and stayed asleep, sometime after 3 when rain finally stopped, but I woke up at around 715am, which was good because we need to assemble about 730 for breakfast and find out what we’d be doing for the morning.  The course ends at noon, so we didn’t have too much time today.

Read on (it’s a short post this time)…

Breakfast today was damper bread, basically just flour (self rising) and a bit of water.  We had raisins, chocolate chips and honey available to add for more flavouring.  I went for some raisins and added the honey on after it was cooked.  Once we’d mixed up the dough in our bowls we placed it down on the upturned lids of the Dutch Ovens, they were placed on the fire to get good and hot.  They cook pretty quickly, perhaps 10 mins at most?  Depends on how thick you make it when it goes on the cooking surface.  All in all it wasn’t bad, we were also supplied with a hard boiled egg to go with it.

After breakfast we needed to break camp, taking down our Basha’s, packing up our personal kit then the hard part, dismantling our shelters we’d built yesterday.  I have to say, I found this harder then building it.  Trying to shift that much material was hard work, it seemed easier the day before when we were bringing smaller loads of the stuff to put on the shelter.  Oh well, all that work gone haha

After that we had a lesson in traps and snares and given a thorough lesson on the laws, going over what you can and can not do when trapping and snaring animals.  We were also shown some strictly survival types of traps like dead fall and spring loaded traps.  This was interesting, I’ve used snares in the past, back in the 80’s and early 90’s but never in a serious manner, so it was interesting to hear the ins and outs from someone who’d been doing it all their lives.  

After this, it was back to the camp again.  A little bit of a debrief and Q&A session as well as a group photo .. I’m waiting for one of the instructors to upload that, then I’ll link it back to here.

We’d all said our thanks to the instructors, and took another quick look around to make sure nothing was forgotten, well I went to have a look.   Then it was the long march back to our cars .. well, it just seemed longer then when we came in I suppose.

Overview

The weekend was great, I’d done a lot of things I’d never done before as well as some things I had but not for a very long time.   Much was learned, which really is the aim of the course, so it was a success.

What did I learn?

  • I don’t much care for Bivvy Bags is the top of the list haha  They’re good and they do what they should, however I found it very constrictive, I’m not claustrophobic by any means, but without some movement available it does get on your nerves a lot.
  • I’d learned a simple way to clean and prep a pigeon, and really hope I can do it more, they were really good eating.
  • I’d (re)learned rabbit prep, would be good to go out and get my own rabbits one day
  • I learned some fire lighting skills, while I didn’t succeed with the bow drill as my back and knees just wouldn’t let me do the actions enough, I will practice it more and get my back and knees working better, I must do that.
  • I had my interest in learning about trees and plants kicked up a notch and I will continue with that by taking some more courses in that area
  • We were taught (or really re-taught) to respect nature and what it can provide

I’m know I’m missing more things, it really was a very jam packed weekend with really not too much idle downtime, which was good.

I would most certainly recommend this course to anyone looking to get a bit more then just the basics of bushcrafting under their belt.

Go on over and check out the folks at Woodland Ways, get yourself on a course and get back to nature!

The course I took was their Woodland Ways Bushcraft Weekend.

I’d like to thank the good folks at Woodland Ways and especially the instructors on my course for making it such a great time!  I really hope to see them again on another course in the near future!

Thanks for reading through this, if you’ve made it this far.