As you know I am always on the
lookout for excellent content on
High Tech Gadgets. Make sure you look
into this piece of content and let me know what you
think. Today’s info is titled Navigation 101: I Don’t Need No Stinking Compass
Article by Tim Forge
Navigation 101: I Don’t Need No Stinking Compass – Outdoors – Hunting
Search by Author, Title or Content
Article ContentAuthor NameArticle Title
Home
Submit Articles
Author Guidelines
Publisher Guidelines
Content Feeds
RSS Feeds
FAQ
Contact Us
It’s never too early to start scouting for next year’s season. Turkey, deer and hog are on the menu for the average hiker/ hunter on the prowl. It is summer in central Florida and the humidity and heat will take its toll on the hardiest of hikers. Hopefully you’ll finish before the sun is high, close to your vehicle where your cold drinks on ice in your cooler are waiting. That’s if you can find your way back. I usually have a good sense of direction and remember which trails I take but is this really a wise philosophy to adopt? Wouldn’t I be more secure in my trekking if I actually knew where I was at or could get back in the dark? This sudden realization left me wondering just what kind of outdoorsman I really am. Am I just a poser? I mean what difference does it make if I can make a fire by rubbing two sticks together if I can’t navigate in the wild without the aid of a high tech device like a personal GPS unit. Let’s see, the s un rises in the east and sets in the west. That’s a no brainer, and takes care of the morning and evening hours. What about the daytime hours? I don’t live out in the plains states so I can’t use the north/south pointing of the foliage of the compass plant like the early settlers did. But if I take my watch and, holding it level, point the hour hand at the sun and then sight a line from the center of the watch through half the distance from the hour hand to 12 o’clock I will be pointing to the south. That’s standard time. Crap, now I have to buy a watch. Cell phones really put the redundancy on that wrist accessory. At night I can find the north star by following the line from the two outside stars of the cup on the big dipper that point to a brighter than average star out in the sky in front of them. Or, if I can see a crescent moon I could draw an imaginary line along the tips of the crescent to point towards the south where it intersects the eart h. So I’m good to go. But just as a precaution I invested in a genuine military, lensatic compass, the Cammenga model 3H. It’s quite impressive to those with compass envy and I can add it to the list of my potential weapons I carry with its impressive weight. Put that dog in a sock and swing it, zowie. It was ten o’clock by the time I pulled up to my selected trail for the day. My plan was to walk a path around the creek bed a few miles away and pick up the trail on the other side where I’ve never been. It was flooded during the season but it appeared that a dirt path went through it to the other side. And notice I did say plan, and plan you must. You just can’t be out there walking willy nilly. What’s that rule? Let someone know what the plan is, someone who won’t be walking with you. Also plan for your turn-around point so you can get back to your car well before dark. If I know about how far I’m going to hike I just divide that di stance by 2 which is about how fast I hike in mph, and the result will be about the time in hours it will take to get back. Otherwise I just time the hike and turn back at the halfway time for a short hike, or a half hour early if it’s an all day jaunt. That means if I started at eight in the morning and wanted to be back by five, I would turn around about noon. If you don’t mind counting your steps all day, you can get some ranger beads and count every left step until you reach a hundred yards, move one bead down and start again. At the end of nine beads, you move one of the upper beads down and,wa la, you’ve traveled a thousand yards, or meters if you choose. But I came out into the woods to scout not count. I strapped on my snake gaiters, hefted my day pack on and adjusted the straps to balance the load that contained plenty of water along with my usual assortment of survival gear, knives, fire starter, med kit, food, shelter, the list could be endless. You have to know when to say when or you’ll be lugging around a fifty pound pack on a day hike. I carry everything to practice for longer excursions and in the event I have to bug out. It is 2012; you know how those Mayans are. Of course the reality is if anything ever did happen, we’d never get of town to do any bugging out. The roads would be gridlocked and everyone would be on foot like herds of zombies. Hey, they say it’s a lifestyle. Sooner or later they’ll probably be right somewhere. The world’s food supply is only forty to fifty days out in reserves. Better stock up on guns and bullets also, and body armor while you’re at it, the list could be endless. And to paraphrase a quote I heard on TV, “They ain’t going to make it anyhow, they ain’t got no gang.” Regardless of the odds, I do have a bug out route planned. It involves bolt cutters, night vision goggles and some very offensive driving. But I’ve said too much. I rifled through my front pack pockets to check my stuff. I had brought along a Garmin GPS device that I had borrowed from my daughter who uses it on her four wheeler excursions. She may not know what north looks like on a compass but if it’s electronic and has a screen, she’s a wiz at it. I also brought along my so called map of the area, and wanted to see what use I could make of it. My topographic map hadn’t arrived yet so I had to make do with a Google earth print out. There is just no substitute for a good map so you can keep track of where you are instead of waiting until you’re lost to figure out where you are. And that is exactly the point of your compass to help you navigate your progress in the wild. I slipped my big jake cowboy hat over my head, turned on the gps and marked my starting waypoint. Then I clicked on ” tracks” which leaves an electronic breadcrumb every fifty four feet so you can reverse course at the end and retrace your pat h. Normally I start off taking an azimuth with a compass from a known position on my map so I can monitor my progress until I end up at my turn-around point, but I got a GPS, baby, I can go wherever I want. Then I strode on down the dirt path. Strange, I thought, now I could see all of the squirrels I hadn’t seen earlier in the year scurrying across the branches of the trees. When it was small game season this place was like a ghost town. I strolled down the dirt road and found that the water in the creek had lowered quite a bit, exposing the roadbed across to the other side. This was a pleasant surprise. I walked under the looming oaks, and cypress, enjoying the shade. Now this is my kind of hiking. It wasn’t long until I found a path that led to another path which I followed for about an hour out into the open pine scrub and palmettos until it eventually lead back into the woods heading for the creek. This could be a good place to set my game camera. I ventured dee per into the thicket that led deeper into tree cover. This looked like as good a place as any to take a leak, I’d been holding it for a mile. But something interrupted me; a low, deep growling grunt. The hairs on the back of neck bristled. I whirled around, reaching for my SOG SEAL pup knife I always carry. Shit, what was that, a swamp ape? I hesitated. What was I going to do, go mano-a-mano with an eight foot hairy creature they can never get a decent picture of? I put the knife away. Maybe it was hog. I just couldn’t see through the dense palmetto thicket underbrush. Yeah, hog, that’s it, I tried to convince myself. You know they’re here, you just don’t see them very often. But one time when I had my son with me on a trail, we could smell them in the thick palmettos. Smell them? Oh really? My next door neighbor once had trapped a couple of hogs and kept them in a pen right next to our dividing fence in the back yard for three months. That’s a smell you don’t forget. Like dead rats in the attic, you never forget. I couldn’t smell anything unusual but the sound was down wind. It was getting a little creepy standing there. Quiet, way too quiet. I figured this would be a good time to mark my location so I fished the GPS device out of my vest pocket and like a conductor of an orchestra waved my arm to press the magic button that would lead me home. That’s when I noticed that the screen wasn’t on. Pressing the start button didn’t work either, and I realized what I had forgotten; extra AA batteries. For my coveted GPS was dead. Crap. I would just have retrace my steps using memory. I turned and headed back out, assuming I was on the return route. Ten minutes later I had a sense that I hadn’t been on this trail before. But I was sure this was the way I had just come from. And that’s the funny thing about memory; it isn’t worth a damn when the terrain all looks the same. I stopped and decided to walk back to the thick woods from where I turned around, to start again. I dragged a couple of big fallen tree branches and placed them down on the path in an x pattern so I would definitely know I had been here. I turned down a little side path but it didn’t go very far. Again I went back to the spot I remember being at, turned around and only saw one path leading out. I started walking but it didn’t look familiar. I looked at my map and figured I was south of the main trail. I finally pulled out the compass for a look. Shocked, I realized that I was still traveling south. I was beginning to feel disoriented. This can lead to making you doubt your mental facilities and give you that sickly, panicky feeling if you’re not aware of it. Kind of like that first time you got lost in a department store when you were a kid. What was needed here was calmness. After five minutes of frantic running, thetrail dissipated under an oak hammock. This wasn’t working. Maybe I should follow the trail of Coors and Shlitz cans that were scattered along the path. Too inconsistent. Those guys could have staggered off anywhere. I looked at my compass again and decided I would turn and head north even if I had to plow through the palmettos. Sooner or later I would have to cross that trail. I ended up at the original turnaround point and took a north azimuth and started walking. What seemed strange was that where the path appeared to end, around the outside of this sprawly bush was actually a continuation of it. How could I have not seen this before? How could my memory of walking into the thick trees from the trail been so off as not to notice turning right into it, instead of walking straight like I thought I had. After a few minutes of walking I realized I must be on the right trail because I was still heading north. An hour later I came upon the main trail before the last haul out to the truck. I started thinking how embarrassing it could have been if I had not brought a compass to convince myself which way to go. I could just hear the news report now. Hiker on bug out maneuver with fifty pound pack lost in wilderness. I felt a little sheepish. When you ain’t got no gang you have to look out for yourself.
About the Author
Forge is an intrepid outdoorsman.
Use and distribution of this article is subject to our Publisher Guidelines
whereby the original author’s information and copyright must be included.
Tim Forge
RSS Feed
Report Article
Publish Article
Print Article
Add to Favorites
Article Directory
About
FAQ
Contact Us
Advanced Search
Privacy Statement
Disclaimer
GoArticles.com © 2012, All Rights Reserved.
Forge is an intrepid outdoorsman.
Use and distribution of this article is subject to our Publisher Guidelines
whereby the original author’s information and copyright must be included.
As you know I am always on the
lookout for excellent content on
High Tech Gadgets. Make sure you look
into this piece of content and let me know what you
think. Today’s info is titled Kent Marine 00395 Tech I Iodine Supplement, 8-Ounce Bottle
Kent Marine 00395 Tech I Iodine Supplement, 8-Ounce Bottle
- Provides free iodine, iodide and timed release iodide
- Keeping Xenia is much easier
- Corals open fuller and grow faster than ever before
- Assists hard corals and helps prevent bleaching
- Increase growth rates in sensitive hard and soft corals
Kent Marine Tech I is the most significant breakthrough in marine additive technology in the last five-year. Although present in salt mixes, iodine is rapidly used up in the system, and removed through protein skimming,ozone and filtration. Whereas other iodine supplements only last a few days, Tech I Iodine supplement provides iodine in a unique triple release system for sustained availability to invertebrates over weeks of time.
List Price: $ 12.79
Price:
You may view the latest post atNavigation 101: I Don't Need No Stinking Compass
Best regards,
ReneMank
tinkogiko@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment