Congratulations Thomas Higgins

on being named best Taranaki Farm Manager. And good luck for the NZ Farm Manager of the year title in Auckland in May.

Fire Lighting March/April 2012

Some of the bits of tinder we gathered and tools for test lighting

Ricky making sparks

The way Bear does it

Plan B - the way a builder does it

Smoke at last.....

Yup, that's where the heat is

Lions Ride - Mountain to Sea

Congratulations Nicholas H on your 3rd placing, and to the other KOPACers who had a great ride

Fire lighting at the Lodge, 31 March - 1 April 2012

Neil & Jacqui, along with Hilary and Ricky and the loaded trailer, made an early start for a busy weekend at the Lodge, but Sharon was even earlier. She’d been reading a survival book kindly supplied by her mother a few years earlier and, oh, there were so many ideas to try out.

Adamson’s had wrestled a couple of rabbits from Mindy so, first things first, Sharon dug a hole, made a fire and buried our dinner. She then went searching for supplejack to make an eel trap. The frame construction was pretty straight forward, but canes that were flexible enough to weave round them were not. As the trap took shape Hilary assisted by splitting the supplejack to make it more flexible. It turned into quite a large structure, in fact a bit too big for the nearby stream, so we ended up with an interesting sculpture on the lawn for the weekend. Just as well we only had two days, that book is a great source of ideas and information.
Neil and Ricky spent the afternoon constructing and installing a replacement staircase for the first bank after the bridge, with help from Jacqui dredging the river rocks and gravel. Hilary replaced the netting on the bridge.

Len turned up just as dinner was dug up, (how does he get the timing right so often?) and with the addition of the usual sumptuous extras an excellent feast was consumed, with plenty left over for tomorrow.

Late in the evening we went fishing to prove that there are eels in the stream, but the juicy piece of steak didn’t entice any. So, no eels, no need for a trap really! Apparently the sculpture will adorn the Adamson garden for a while instead.

We didn’t bother to stay up to welcome in the end of daylight savings, nor did we do the usual April Fools tricks on Sunday morning. So at a very civilised hour we started on the leftovers and spent time discussing the fire lighting plan.

Neil stayed behind to install an extra bench beside the gas cooker and the rest took a wander through the bush looking for all different types of tinder which we took back and systematically tried to set alight. It’s interesting to see what burns, but even more amazing to find out the ones that wouldn’t. Phase 2 was to use a ‘never fail’ flint but it was extremely difficult to get the spark to light the tinder.

How come Bear always finds the right sort of dry combustible tinder? Ah, I know, we didn’t have the benefit of program editing.

As a final hurrah, we boiled water in a plastic bottle over a fire – it worked really well, but no-one wanted to drink the water (probably full of chemicals leached from the plastic, but in an emergency it would be great).

It just goes to show, what works on telly, doesn’t necessarily work in the native bush of New Zealand. Anyway, there are now 5 of us that know which tinder to look for, but that’s our secret. It’s a pity you weren’t there……..