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Thanks for the thoughts and great pics.
2 cents on the rigging: I had a bunch of (free) lightweight 1/2" tubular webbing (from some electrical/industrial source) doesn’t weigh more than p-cord and IMHO is more hand/shoulder friendly for grabbing and carrying an inflated boat (i.e. for short portages over the many low head dams we have out here).
I found a broken carbon Werner shaft/blade in the weeds when I was out last weekend (very happy w/first bike to boat to bike trip!) so I think I’m going w/that. Water is coming up big time in CO and I’m all sorts of excited…
A few webbing thoughts:
One thing to think about w/ the 1/2" tubular web: webbing can blow out immediately under strain if you damage it. In my old line of work, we’d do long free-hanging rappels on 3/4" web, but we were choosing it for a variety of factors (one of those “this is the least of many evils” situations) and developed proceedures specifically designed to deal w/ it, including checking it by hand after every use. Also, our application conveniently kept it out of sand, etc. Only 1 fatality was ever suffered using it for this (70 ft. head-first fall, I believe, by a guy off-duty using an old let-down tape for tree work), out of tens of thousands of uses, but we still eventually went to a braided kevlar rope instead. I believe there were quite a few near-misses from the tapes exploding when damaged in-use.
Another thing to think about might be how much water it absorbs.
Also, can generate a lot of friction against itself & hardware, so running rigs might be more difficult to pull it through, and generate more heat/friction/abrasion. There also could be a higher propensity to jamming in some situations. (Friction example: we’d do free-hanging raps w/ our body weight + 50-70 lbs. of gear, and the “device” was a single round wrap of 3/4" webbing around 2 rap-rings. So… lotsa friction, no need for even a munter hitch).
So… it might be really good for your use, but I’d just offer that from my experience, be cognizant that it’s vulnerable to catastrophic failure & abrasion, and is a little different when used in running rigs.
I am a big fan of throw bags. I’ve created one with a standard throw bag cover, a short length of fat poly pro line which a swimmer can see and grab, tied to a long length of small diameter Dyneema cord.
On fire-starting:
Those REI matches are nice, as long as both the match AND the striker are kept quite dry. Yes the matches can handle brief immersion in water (even when lit) but slight dampness over the long term can make them soft and useless. Also they are pretty finicky if you don’t have the striker from the box, as are most matches. Erin prefers them, but I don’t.
My method is to sequester bic lighters in 3-5 different dry places in my gear. They can get wet, though you might have to dry them in your clothes a bit before the striker will work. Also some part of the striker is steel and will break if it rusts in salt water. But normal dampness is not much of a problem, and they are cheap and light enough that you can have many of them in different places (e.g. a camera dry-bag, a ditch bag, your pocket, and your sleeping-bag dry-bag.)
As important as ignition is some sort of fire-starting aid. My favorite is paper towel soaked in paraffin. However all sorts of things work, like some dry grass stowed in a dry-bag, or a bit of polypropylene rope found on the beach. Or some piece of plastic gear.
And of course, practice is good.
I’ve been meaning to try out the magnesium striker things… seems kinda cool.
I’ve been working with a BPL firesteel for the last month. It’s cool, and starts a good firestarter (I use wads of cotton soaked in denatured alcohol) with one spark.
Still working on using it to ignite all field-gathered materials. Haven’t had much success, you need some really nice fine and dry tinder for that.
Yeah, I forgot to mention alcohol… very nice thing to have along for firestarting.
We use 90 or 99% isopropyl alcohol. It is useful for firestarting, but also for gear repairs (clean before Aquaseal) and for wound sterilization.
When using it for firestarting, it’s very useful for getting a good strong ignition, but it won’t go much beyond that. If you need a lot of heat from your firestarter (e.g. for damp kindling), you’ll do better with something wax based. What I usually do is set up a fire I think I could probably start with no firestarter, then I add a very small amount of alcohol and light it. Sort of hedging against my lazyness and overconfidence.
on our gulf trip we used a 2 oz bottle of alcohol and Dylan had some candles. We were lazy for the most part when it was raining, but between the two methods we usually got things going.
I got ID’d as the firestarter during a rather cold & rainy GC trip last January. The number-one firestarting trick I learned? Peer pressure! Everyone shivering, looking expectantly at you…
That totally doesn’t work for me… for some reason if I have an audience, I always screw up firestarting. Worst if someone has a video camera…
The little packaged swabs of alcohol are best for flesh and raft wounds; my fire starter alcohol is mixed 50-50 with 100% Deet, thereby cutting the Jungle Juice and making it also easy to light fires.
Bug dope on toilet paper works too, although something tells me som a you don’t use the stuff.
Ahhhhhh!!!.
Here you have a response from an Australian Doctor - several issues come up here. We have a far less litiginous society than you guys in the first place, and as a doctor, we are already used to “covering our own arses”, as they say - ie you make your own decisions, based on your own knowledge, and doing the best you can.
Most of my packrafting has been in a very remote area of NZ,with one mate, approx 3 days walk from the nearest road end, so we are entirely self sufficient on our 8-9 day trips. We take a Sat phone for real emergencies (however there are even issues with Sat phone access in the river we fish, and it often doesn’t work for hours at a time due to the deep valley we are in), plus a very basic first aid kit, which has been reduced over the years to the degree that I can now only treat moderate pain, or put a bandaid on things, suture a laceration or treat a basic infection! My skills exceed my equipment, but I hate carrying all the stuff “I might need” but never have!
As to rafting stuff, we use home made PFDs made using 10l wine cask bladders; we do carry 20m throw bags (4mm floating dinghy rope), and that’s that! Perhaps we’re fatalists…PFDs have been worthwhile several times ( and actually work!), although obviously they re not "approved " designs. Never used throw bags. We do tend to be cautious, given the remoteness of our situation, however we still push it a bit.
AND, I’m still trying to upload some video of our recent trip to youtube…!
The Iban are one of the river cultures in Borneo. They live in longhouses above the flood line and pole, paddle, push or motor their longboats on everything from big, Yukon-sized flows to little creeks.
I asked a long-haired, tiger-tattooed, sarong-wearing, smiling young man for some fire starting advice and he gave me a chunk of inner tube. Stinky when lit, but works, even when wet. And won’t leak from a tube or broken bottle.
It’s now part of my safety kit.
I’ve been using inner tube for a few years, and it works very well. Rubber bands also work, and are easier to light. Neither of these can be lit with a “light my fire” striker (although I wonder about lighting anything less than a gas /white spirit with these! - on a post on another forum, one guy wrote that although he accepted that these worked, and were quite a “fun” way to light a fire, mini Bic lighters were lighter, cheaper, and more reliable…). Roman’s idea of putting alcohol with DEET is novel, however in NZ this year we found that dettol/tea tree oil/sunscreen/baby oil mix was more useful (for sandflies, horrible little bastards that they are), and less toxic than the 80% DEET we have used previously, and I’m not sure whether alcohol would add to this cocktail. I was left wondering , however, about using those little alcohol swabs that us doctors use before injections - they weigh almost nothing, and I’m sure that the packaging would also burn, AND they’d light with a “light my fire” fire striker!! AND they could be used for raft repairs. Not sure about using them on wounds though - a decent irrigation with water would be far more comfortable for the person with the wound, working on the medical premise of “dilution is the solution to pollution”, and as an aside, someone did a study once showing that wiping an injection site with an alcohol swab before injecting it made no useful difference to the bugs on the skin there. The conclusion was that the most useful aspect of the alcohol swab was to be able to put some pressure on the injection site after the injection, to stop it bleed!
I’ve been able to get somewhat consistent at starting an al natural fire with a firesteel, but you need ideal tinder to have any chance at all. Read: lots easier in the Colorado Plateau than MT.