Current Book Project Now Listed on Amazon:

Now that the book I'm currently working on has a page on Amazon complete with the preliminary cover image, I can give you a hint as to what it's about:

There will be a subtle change to the title and sub-title, as discussed with my publisher, but this is close.  Unlike Bug Out, this book will not be a guide or how-to, but should be entertaining reading to anyone interested in the subject of survival.  The scenarios presented here will cover a wide range of predicaments that others have lived through and that you might find yourself in as well, especially if you are the adventurous sort.

Here's a brief description from the publisher:

During a catastrophic event, what separates those who survive from those who are never seen again? In 13 suspenseful adventures, each a story of overcoming impossible odds, the author reveals the three vital ways to cheat death when all seems lost—avoid panic, know your survival skills, and maintain a relentless determination to make it out alive.

A unique combination of fictional scenarios, true accounts, and instructive sidebars, Would You Survive? educates as it entertains. Readers realize how important it is to suppress the natural panic response that produces bad decisions and often fatal outcomes.

Teaching by example, the characters use real-life survival tactics—including navigating, building shelters, finding water, and signaling for help. Scattered throughout the book, bonus profiles recount true survivor stories that illustrate how the determination to live in the bleakest and most devastating conditions has saved the lives of countless people.


The scenarios range from urban disasters to wilderness ordeals in many different environments.  And of course for the the readers of this blog and Bug Out, one of them will be a "bug-out" situation.  Needless to say, this is a big project and I'm working hard to get it done in time to meet the publication date.  I'll be posting more about it here as publication gets closer, as well as some posts about the types of predicaments that will be discussed in the book and how you could end up in one. 

Bug Out Boat: Folding PakCanoe

If you've read my Bug Out book, you know that a lot of the prime roadless bug-out locations that I describe are along rivers or in swamps, lakes or coastal marshes - especially in regions like the Gulf Coast Southeast (Chapter 5), the East Coast (Chapter 6) and the North Woods (Chapter 8).  Many of these locations will be inaccessible to you if you don't have a boat of some sort, and some of the most remote areas are only accessible by the smallest boats such as canoes and kayaks that can be carried over or around obstructions.

The folks who are most likely to need the bug-out strategy in the first place are those in some of the larger urban or suburban areas of these regions, many of whom live in apartments or other situations where storing boats is problematic.  There are many solutions to such obstacles, but it occurred to me that many readers here may not be aware of some of the options available, like the PakCanoe, a folding canoe that I have personally had quite a bit of experience with in some really tough conditions.

Folding kayaks have been around for a long time, based as they are on the original kayaks from the Arctic that were built with a skin-on-frame construction.  Folding canoes are more difficult to engineer because of the lack of decks, which add rigidity and tie the hull sides together.  But Alv Elvstad, the designer of the Pak Boats line of folding canoes and kayaks, has overcome the difficulties and has been producing a proven folding canoe for quite some years now. 

These canoes range from shorter solo craft to the 17-foot tandem expedition canoe like the one shown above.  They consist of a take-down aluminum frame that assembles much like the aluminum poles in a modern tent, and a skin of tough PVC coated fabric with a Hypalon bottom like those found in a Zodiac inflatable dinghy.  These canoes are not fragile as you might think at first glance.  Instead, they excel in handling whitewater rapids and absorb the bumps and blows of rocky rivers better than many hard shell canoes.

The best part about these boats is that they can be disassembled and stored in a closet in your apartment or kept in the trunk of a car or otherwise carried on a larger bug-out vehicle until you get to where you need a boat.  My experience with the 17-foot PakCanoe began in 1995 when my friend and fellow Mississippi writer Ernest Herndon and I decided we wanted to canoe the remote Patuca River in the Mosquitia Region of Honduras.  If you ever saw the movie or read the novel, The Mosquito Coast, this is the river part of the story takes place on.

You don't get to a river like the Patuca by driving to the boat ramp. The upper reaches of this river are surrounded by mountainous jungle.  To get there, we hopped a ride on a missionary bush plane out of La Ceiba, on the coast, to a Rus Rus, a Miskito Village near the Rio Coco, which forms the border with Nicaragua.  There's a dirt road that leads from Rus Rus a bit farther up the Coco to the village of Auas Bila, and from there we had to travel by motorized dug-out up the Coco to a place where a foot path leads through a pass in the mountains separating the Rio Coco from the Rio Patuca.  We could not have carried any sort of rigid canoe on this trip, the first obstacle being the bush plane flight, and then the trip up the Rio Coco, which has many rapids, then the two day trek on a muddy trail through the jungle to the Rio Patuca.  But with the PakCanoe stored away in two duffel bags in addition to all our camping gear and food supplies, the trip was doable with the help of some Miskito guides we hired at Auas Bila.

Here's a photo of the giant dugout we took up the Rio Coco, along with our guides and the bags containing the canoe and gear.  The village outboard for the big canoe is not yet mounted here:

The assembly site at the end of the trail connecting the Rio Coco with the Rio Patuca.  The guides had to use their machetes to make a clearing big enough for us to camp and put together the 17-foot boat.  There was no sandbar or other opening on the river bank here.  You can barely see the rolled up red canoe in the photo below, almost swallowed up in all that tropical greenery. 

We said goodbye to our guides and set off paddling down the Patuca, our destination the village of Brus Laguna, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras.  Once we started moving downriver, the scenery opened up like this:

Here's a shot of Ernest Herndon with the PakCanoe somewhere on the Patuca.  We made it all the way to the coast without issues with the boat.  It carried the load well, handled minor rapids we encountered, and allowed us to make a decent daily mileage, though not as much as we would have made in a sleeker fiberglass or wood canoe.

At the end of the journey we disassembled the boat on the beach at Brus Laguna and once again loaded it in a small plane for a flight back to civilization. The trip was a success, made possible by this well-designed and well-built folding canoe.  Ernest ended up keeping the boat and we later used it on a trip down the rock-strewn Ouachita River in Arkansas, among other places. 

Everything has downsides, of course, and the PakCanoe is no exception.  For one thing, it's expensive, as are all quality folding boats, whether canoe or kayak.  The other drawback is long-term durability, which is going to be less than most hard-shell boats.  Ernest patched the hull time after time over the years, but eventually gave up on it after it reached the end of its useful life.  It wasn't too much of a loss as we didn't have to front the expense of buying it for our trip because the designer sent it to Ernest for free, as he was seeking reviews at the time and we gladly obliged him by testing it.

In many bug-out situations, long-term durability may not be as important as having a boat right now when you need it.  The main thing is having the means to reach an inaccessible location until  you can do better, so if you live somewhere that doesn't accommodate a rigid canoe or if you drive a vehicle you can't carry one on, you may want to look into the PakCanoe or one of the similar folding sea kayaks.  I'll be writing about those here as well in a future post.

Book Review: Lost in the Jungle

One of the great fringe benefits of writing books is that I get to read a lot of good books in the course of my research.  I've been reading lots of first-person narratives of near-death survival experiences lately while working on my current book project which will be completed in the next two months.  One such book is Yossi Ghinsberg's Lost in the Jungle.   At one time, back when I was obsessed with getting to the jungle for the first time myself, I read anything and everything I could find related to jungle travel.  Now, having been there and done that  more than once, it began to have less appeal, and somehow I passed on Ghinsberg's excellent book a couple of times when I picked up the original hardcover edition in the bookstore and flipped through the pages. 

I now realize the mistake I made after recently reading this book, which I couldn't put down once drawn into the narrative.  Lost in the Jungle is in fact a gripping account of a lone man with little knowledge of wilderness survival facing one of the most unforgiving wildernesses in the world - a trackless swath of the Bolivian Amazon along the remote and inaccessible Tuichi River.

Here is a Google Earth view of the area where Ghinsberg was lost.  Note that not only is it an unbroken tract of virgin rainforest, it is also rugged and mountainous, the rivers cascading in whitewater rapids through treacherous canyons. Try to imagine what it would be like to try to walk out of such a jungle, alone with nothing but a lighter, a poncho and a few remaining morsels of beans and rice, your feet peeling from jungle rot and not even a machete to aid in gathering food or cutting a path: 

Ghinsberg is extremely fortunate that he lived to write his book. Two of the four companions he started out with on his ill-prepared trip were never heard from again.  In the first part of the book as you read his account of how they ended up in such a predicament, it's hard to have much sympathy for any of them as you see mistake after mistake being made.  But once Ghinsberg is alone and telling of his terrifying experiences after getting swept through raging rapids on a log raft when he becomes separated from his remaining companion, his descriptions of the difficulties the jungle presents and his methods of dealing with them with practically nothing win you over to his side.  He turns out to be an incredibly tenacious survivor against odds that few experts would care to even contemplate.  Even with his inexperience, he manages to find food, shelter himself from torrential downpours, survive a flash flood that nearly sweeps him away, extricate himself from quicksand bogs and fend off a prowling jaguar in the middle of the night.

I think the most important lesson this book has to teach is the role of attitude and the will to live in an extreme test of life or death.  Ghinsberg refuses to give up, and near the end of the narrative, when he knows he can't walk out, he resigns himself to the possibility that he may have to wait months before someone comes along on the river.  Even with this dismal prospect, he starts making plans to survive alone like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe of the jungle until he can get out.  It is little wonder that today he makes his living as a motivational speaker.  More about what he is doing now can be found on his website here:  http://www.ghinsberg.com/

Sub-tropical South Florida

I had a great, but too-short getaway to south Florida last weekend, where as I mentioned in my last post, I was headed to attend a get together of Wharram catamaran enthusiasts in Islamorada, way down in the Keys. I've posted some photos from the rendezvous and more about the boats over on my Element II blog, where I'm documenting the construction of my own Wharram Tiki 26 - which will be my ultimate go-anywhere bug-out boat. On that page you will also find a link to a slideshow with many more photos from this rendezvous.

In this post, I just wanted to share a few photos from the unique environment that is sub-tropical south Florida.  I never get tired of exploring this area, despite the hassle of driving down the peninsula in high-speed, nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic on the interstate.  Although I describe several good bug-out locations in the state in my new bug-out book, I pity the millions who would be trapped in bottleneck of congestion trying to get out of south Florida in a true SHTF scenario.  Hurricane evacuations are bad enough.

But if one had a seaworthy small boat, such as the one I took with me on this trip, there are vast expanses of shallow, remote backwaters to bug-out to, many of them fringed by great mangrove forests, where it would be easy to hide out and easy to forage for fish, crabs, oysters and other seafood:

Many of these waters in the Florida Keys are so shallow that you often run aground even in a kayak, but if there is any sunlight at all, you can pick your way through because it's easy to see the bottom in the crystal clear waters there:

Most of the smaller mangrove-covered islands in the Keys and Florida Bay are nearly impenetrable, like this one in the photo below, but among these tangles of roots, you can find small pocket beaches, often completely hidden from view of anyone passing by on the open water.  I have spent weeks at a time camped in such places during my longer kayak trips that took me through the area. 

Inland from the mangrove-fringed coastal areas, the Everglades is  full of hidden, freshwater creeks like this one.  Some of these appear impassable, even in a canoe, but you can often push or cut your way through the thicker areas, and go for days, like my friend Ernest Herndon and I did when we spent some ten days canoeing the 'glades on my first trip there. 

Nowhere else in North America will you find the exotic plant species that are common in the Everglades and much of south Florida.  An example is the strangler fig, shown below - a tree that is common in the jungles of Latin America, where it is known as the "mata-palo" (tree-killer).  It grows around and eventually strangles the host tree. 

Of course, my favorite south Florida exotic is the coconut palm, which is not native to the area but is now firmly established and can be found in the wild in many places.  I've often climbed these to get the drinking nuts while camped on the remote beaches of Cape Sable, at the southern tip of the peninsula.  They are also common throughout the Keys.

The Everglades is a paradise for reptiles and amphibians.  Anyone who is not squeamish about eating snakes, lizards, turtles and the like would have no trouble finding food here.

Of course 'gators are everywhere in the 'glades - more plentiful in the freshwater areas, but also in the brackish and salt water of the mangrove fringes, where they share habitat with the American crocodile, which is making a big comeback in south Florida. Another big reptile that is doing well, but does not belong in this ecosystem is the Burmese python, which has now populated much of south Florida.  I looked, but didn't see any on this trip.

The 'gators alone are so plentiful that one could easily survive by hunting the small ones.  Alligator meat is good, too.  I used to stop in every chance I got to get a 'gator-tail po-boy at a little restaurant in Louisiana down near the Honey Island Swamp. 

On another note, I noticed that down along the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41), where there are many small Miccosukee Indian settlements, large gated fences with "Keep Out" signs have been erected since last time I passed that way.  I also noticed this sign at one such village - apparently Bush is to blame for whatever's wrong here as well.  I didn't know he was British, however....

Drinking Water From Vines

I just received an interesting email from a former Mississippi resident, Leon Pantenburg, who now lives in Oregon and publishes a great online survival resource:  Survival Common Sense.  Leon describes himself as a "wilderness enthusiast" in his bio, but if you read it, you'll agree that this is an understatement. He's done some awesome trips, including paddling the Mississippi River from the headwaters to the Gulf in a canoe and backpacking all over the West in some of the finest wilderness areas in the country.

Leon sent me a few topics he'd posted on his own site and invited me to share them with my readers here.  I found this article on getting drinking water from vines especially interesting, as I have used the method myself.  Here in the jungle-like woods of the Deep South, large woody vines, or lianas, are common.   Most of the largest ones are some variety of wild grape, but there are others as well. Many of these bear the delicious wild grapes called "muscadines" in these parts, and are eaten as is, used in jellies and preserves, and for making excellent wine.

Leon frequently collaborates with survival writer, Peter Kummerfeldt, author of the book Surviving a Wilderness Emergency.  This article was written by Kummerfeldt, with the notes in italics by Leon.  These are Leon's photos as well, taken near the Big Black River on a recent trip back to Mississippi.  Hope you enjoy this as much as I did:


If you live in the southeastern United States, or in any jungle-like tropical area, here is a tip for finding a drinking water source. Like any survival tip, experiment and check this out before you need it!

 Water can be obtained from vines. Water-producing vines varying in size from pencil thickness up to the thickness of an adult man’s forearm can be found throughout much of the southeastern United States.
When selecting a vine as a water source, look for those with a larger diameter. The greater the thickness of the vine, the more water it is capable of producing. A sharp knife, or better still, a machete, will be needed to sever the tough, woody vine. Start by cutting into the vine. 

Vines that exude a white latex sap, or those that produce a colored or foul smelling sap, should be avoided.

If no sap is noticed, or if the sap that is observed is clear and without aroma, remove a 24-inch inch section by severing the higher end first and then the lower end. If the lower end is cut first, the water contained within the vine is drawn up by capillary action and far less water will drain out by the time that the upper end is severed.

Once removed, the section of vine is held vertically and the water contained within it will drain into a container  (perhaps a cupped hand) where it should be further evaluated.

Liquid that is colored should not be consumed. Liquid that has an unpleasant aroma, other that a faint “woody” smell, should also be discarded. This water could be used to satisfy any hygiene needs.
Taste a small amount of the water. Water that has a disagreeable flavor, other than a slightly “earthy” or “woody” taste, should not be utilized for drinking. Hold a small amount of water in your mouth for a few moments to determine if there is any burning or other disagreeable sensation. If any irritating sensation occurs, the water should be discarded.

Ultimately, liquid that looks like water, smells like water and tastes like water, is water and can be safely consumed in large quantities without further purification. Preventing dehydration and maintaining your ability to function safely and survive depends on your ability to locate and gather water efficiently and safely.

  Another note from Leon: A recent trip to the great state of Mississippi gave me the chance to test this survival technique for finding water in vines.  Walking through a beautiful deciduous forest near the Big Black River wetlands, I noticed many vines hanging from trees. They’re called “wild grape” vines by the Warren County locals, even though the vines don’t bear any fruit.   

My first reaction was to grab one and see if a person can really swing through the trees. Instead, I took out my Leatherman, locked in the saw blade and followed Peter’s instructions. The vines produced beautiful, clear water that tasted great!

I'd like to add that as a kid growing up in Mississippi and spending as much time as possible in the woods, my friends and I often played "Tarzan" by following through with what Leon thought about.  First you have to cut the vine loose near the ground, and hope the many tendrils wrapped far up in the branches of the host tree will hold your weight.  Some of these vines allowed some really long and exciting swings.  The fun stopped one day when one of our group of pre-teen boys named Kervin Farr plummeted nearly forty feet into a big gully that we were swinging across - breaking both of his legs and ending up in a wheelchair for a few months.  So be careful!

More information on getting water from vines and other plants can be found in the "Tropical Rainforest Survival" section of the excellent book: How to Survive on Land and Sea, by Frank C. Craighead Jr. and John J. Craighead.