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Rough Camping & Survival Tips
MINDSET….
They found him just after dawn, sitting beside a dry riverbed as if he were waiting for a bus.
His shirt was torn, his lips were cracked, but his eyes were clear—terrifyingly clear. When the search team broke through the thicket, he didn’t leap up crying. He simply nodded, raised a hand in weary greeting, and took a slow sip from an improvised water pouch made from his own sock and a scrap of plastic.
He’d been missing for thirty-six hours in the Namibian bushveld.
He walked out without help.
This is how.
Most people believe survival is a battle. A war you wage against nature—against the thorns, the heat, the predators, the thirst.
They are wrong.
Survival is not a battle. It is a negotiation.
And this man, Johan van Reenen, a cattle farmer with dirt under his nails and stubbornness in his bones, learned the hard way that you cannot bully the wild into sparing you. You must listen to it. You must dance to its terrible, ancient tune.
It began, as these stories often do, with a small mistake.
A broken fence. A stray calf. A decision to chase the tracks “just five more minutes” under the merciless midday sun. He left his bakkie, his water bottle, his hat on the passenger seat. The bush swallowed his footsteps the moment he took them onto a neighboring ranch he had not been to since he was a child.
By three PM, the horizon had shifted. The landmarks he’d sworn by seemed to have rotated. The heat was a physical weight, pressing the air from his lungs.
This was the First Temptation: Panic.
He felt it rise—a metallic taste in his mouth, a buzzing in his veins. Run. His logic screamed it. Sprint, find the road, fight your way back!
And for an hour, he obeyed. He crashed through thorn thickets, scrambled up anthills, his breath sawing in his chest. Each direction looked the same. Each opening led to another wall of green. The bush was mocking him.
Then, as he stumbled into a small clearing, shins bleeding and fury boiling over, he saw it.
A chameleon, moving across a branch with infinite, deliberate slowness.
It took a full minute to cross two feet of wood.
Johan stopped, chest heaving, and watched. In that minute, something in him broke. Not his will—his arrogance. The chameleon wasn’t fighting the branch, the heat, the world. It was being part of it. It was efficient. It was patient.
It was surviving.
“I sat down right there,” he later said. “And I told myself: You are not in charge anymore.”
This was the Turning Point: Surrender.
Not surrender to death. Surrender to reality.
He stopped fighting the thirst. Instead, he acknowledged it. He let the dry ache in his throat become a part of him, a compass point. He stopped fighting the coming night. He started preparing for it.
Using the last of the light, he did not search for his bakkie. He searched for a teacher.
He found a large old leadwood tree. Its north side had thicker moss. Ant trails moved toward a barely visible depression in the soil. As dusk fell, he heard the faint, gossamer call of Namaqua sandgrouse—birds that fly to water at dawn and dusk. He marked their direction in his mind.
He curled in the root bowl of the tree, using dry grass for insulation. He did not sleep. He listened.
The night came alive. The crunch of a porcupine foraging. The distant whoop of a hyena clan—not a threat, but a map of occupied territory .but he removed and opened a small Joseph Rogers pocket knife he had with him just in case he needed it, The wind shifting, carrying the faint, cool scent of… damp? Or just wishful thinking?
He let the cold pass through him. He stopped shivering by accepting he was cold.
At first light, he moved. Not blindly, but on purpose. He followed the ant trails to the depression—dry. But the earth was cooler there. He used a flat stone to dig, slow and steady. Six inches down, the sand darkened. Twelve inches, it became moist. He sucked the moisture from a cloth squeezed over the sand, a few precious drops at a time.
He remembered the sandgrouse. He walked in the direction they’d flown, his pace matching the chameleon’s. He watched for bees. He followed the paths of game, not to find animals, but to find what they knew.
He was no longer a lost man. He was a student. And the bush, reluctantly, began to whisper its secrets.
He found the dry riverbed. He walked its course, knowing it was a artery in the landscape. And there, under a cut bank, he saw a stain of green. A single, stubborn patch of reeds.
Water.
Not much. A seep. But enough.
He used his sock and a piece of plastic wrapper from an old feed supplement he found in his pocket (a habit of saving things that finally paid off) to create a solar still, condensing precious drips into his mouth.
He waited. He listened. He belonged.
When the searchers’ voices finally echoed through the trees, he felt not just relief, but a strange, profound gratitude. The bush had not beaten him. It had taught him.
THE QUIET LESSON: THE MINDSET SHIFT
Johan’s story isn’t about gear. It’s about psychology.
The Survival Trinity:
Stop Fighting: Panic is fuel burned with the engine in neutral. It gets you nowhere and drains your tank. Accept your situation immediately. Calm is not a feeling; it is the first and most important decision you make.
Start Observing: Your primary tool is not your knife, but your attention. The environment is constantly communicating. Animal behavior, insect sounds, plant growth patterns, wind direction—it’s all data. Your life depends on your ability to read it.
Become Part of the System: You are no longer a tourist here. You are a participant. Move with the rhythms of the land, not against them. Conserve energy like a predator resting in the shade. Seek water like a bird. Insulate like a burrowing animal.
Survival isn’t about conquering nature. It’s about recognizing you are a small, clever part of it. The bush doesn’t care if you live or die. But if you listen closely enough, it might just show you how to live.
Share if this story changed your perspective on what it means to be strong.
What’s the one "useless" habit or item in your pack that might just save you serious discomfort or worse?
[Copied with permission]
They found him just after dawn, sitting beside a dry riverbed as if he were waiting for a bus.
His shirt was torn, his lips were cracked, but his eyes were clear—terrifyingly clear. When the search team broke through the thicket, he didn’t leap up crying. He simply nodded, raised a hand in weary greeting, and took a slow sip from an improvised water pouch made from his own sock and a scrap of plastic.
He’d been missing for thirty-six hours in the Namibian bushveld.
He walked out without help.
This is how.
Most people believe survival is a battle. A war you wage against nature—against the thorns, the heat, the predators, the thirst.
They are wrong.
Survival is not a battle. It is a negotiation.
And this man, Johan van Reenen, a cattle farmer with dirt under his nails and stubbornness in his bones, learned the hard way that you cannot bully the wild into sparing you. You must listen to it. You must dance to its terrible, ancient tune.
It began, as these stories often do, with a small mistake.
A broken fence. A stray calf. A decision to chase the tracks “just five more minutes” under the merciless midday sun. He left his bakkie, his water bottle, his hat on the passenger seat. The bush swallowed his footsteps the moment he took them onto a neighboring ranch he had not been to since he was a child.
By three PM, the horizon had shifted. The landmarks he’d sworn by seemed to have rotated. The heat was a physical weight, pressing the air from his lungs.
This was the First Temptation: Panic.
He felt it rise—a metallic taste in his mouth, a buzzing in his veins. Run. His logic screamed it. Sprint, find the road, fight your way back!
And for an hour, he obeyed. He crashed through thorn thickets, scrambled up anthills, his breath sawing in his chest. Each direction looked the same. Each opening led to another wall of green. The bush was mocking him.
Then, as he stumbled into a small clearing, shins bleeding and fury boiling over, he saw it.
A chameleon, moving across a branch with infinite, deliberate slowness.
It took a full minute to cross two feet of wood.
Johan stopped, chest heaving, and watched. In that minute, something in him broke. Not his will—his arrogance. The chameleon wasn’t fighting the branch, the heat, the world. It was being part of it. It was efficient. It was patient.
It was surviving.
“I sat down right there,” he later said. “And I told myself: You are not in charge anymore.”
This was the Turning Point: Surrender.
Not surrender to death. Surrender to reality.
He stopped fighting the thirst. Instead, he acknowledged it. He let the dry ache in his throat become a part of him, a compass point. He stopped fighting the coming night. He started preparing for it.
Using the last of the light, he did not search for his bakkie. He searched for a teacher.
He found a large old leadwood tree. Its north side had thicker moss. Ant trails moved toward a barely visible depression in the soil. As dusk fell, he heard the faint, gossamer call of Namaqua sandgrouse—birds that fly to water at dawn and dusk. He marked their direction in his mind.
He curled in the root bowl of the tree, using dry grass for insulation. He did not sleep. He listened.
The night came alive. The crunch of a porcupine foraging. The distant whoop of a hyena clan—not a threat, but a map of occupied territory .but he removed and opened a small Joseph Rogers pocket knife he had with him just in case he needed it, The wind shifting, carrying the faint, cool scent of… damp? Or just wishful thinking?
He let the cold pass through him. He stopped shivering by accepting he was cold.
At first light, he moved. Not blindly, but on purpose. He followed the ant trails to the depression—dry. But the earth was cooler there. He used a flat stone to dig, slow and steady. Six inches down, the sand darkened. Twelve inches, it became moist. He sucked the moisture from a cloth squeezed over the sand, a few precious drops at a time.
He remembered the sandgrouse. He walked in the direction they’d flown, his pace matching the chameleon’s. He watched for bees. He followed the paths of game, not to find animals, but to find what they knew.
He was no longer a lost man. He was a student. And the bush, reluctantly, began to whisper its secrets.
He found the dry riverbed. He walked its course, knowing it was a artery in the landscape. And there, under a cut bank, he saw a stain of green. A single, stubborn patch of reeds.
Water.
Not much. A seep. But enough.
He used his sock and a piece of plastic wrapper from an old feed supplement he found in his pocket (a habit of saving things that finally paid off) to create a solar still, condensing precious drips into his mouth.
He waited. He listened. He belonged.
When the searchers’ voices finally echoed through the trees, he felt not just relief, but a strange, profound gratitude. The bush had not beaten him. It had taught him.
THE QUIET LESSON: THE MINDSET SHIFT
Johan’s story isn’t about gear. It’s about psychology.
The Survival Trinity:
Stop Fighting: Panic is fuel burned with the engine in neutral. It gets you nowhere and drains your tank. Accept your situation immediately. Calm is not a feeling; it is the first and most important decision you make.
Start Observing: Your primary tool is not your knife, but your attention. The environment is constantly communicating. Animal behavior, insect sounds, plant growth patterns, wind direction—it’s all data. Your life depends on your ability to read it.
Become Part of the System: You are no longer a tourist here. You are a participant. Move with the rhythms of the land, not against them. Conserve energy like a predator resting in the shade. Seek water like a bird. Insulate like a burrowing animal.
Survival isn’t about conquering nature. It’s about recognizing you are a small, clever part of it. The bush doesn’t care if you live or die. But if you listen closely enough, it might just show you how to live.
Share if this story changed your perspective on what it means to be strong.
What’s the one "useless" habit or item in your pack that might just save you serious discomfort or worse?
[Copied with permission]
A survival Story...
The River's Patient Smile
It was the kind of river that lulls you into a story you tell yourself: I know you.
Jacques Marais had guided clients across the lower reaches of the Olifants River a dozen times. That afternoon, with the sun bleeding orange into the thornveld and a long walk back to camp still ahead, the river looked… reasonable. Wide, yes. Brown with the tea-stain of recent rain, certainly. But its surface was a lazy, unbroken sheet of copper, sliding past with a murmur, not a roar.
“It’s fine,” he said, more to himself than to the two wide-eyed accountants from Johannesburg behind him. “Follow exactly where I step.”
The water, when it took him, was shockingly cold. A heart-stopping grip around his calves. But the gravel bottom felt firm, reassuring. See? he told the quickening beat in his chest. Just water.
His second step was the last one he took on earth that day.
The riverbed didn’t slope. It vanished.
One moment, solid ground. The next, an endless, sucking nothing. It wasn't a trip or a slip. It was an erasure. The calm brown surface had been a lie—a taut skin over a muscular, hungry dark.
The power was absolute. It didn't knock him over. It unmade his standing. The current, moving with the silent mass of a freight train, took his feet from under him and swallowed him whole.
The world inverted. Sound became a deep, churning roar. Light died to a murky, swirling brown. His mouth, opened in a gasp, filled with the taste of silt and decay. His heavy boots, his trusted boots, became anchors, snagging on a hidden skeleton of submerged roots. For a terrifying second, the river pinned him down, claiming him.
Then the leather tore. He exploded upward, breaking the surface with a ragged, screaming gasp—already twenty meters downstream and moving faster than a man can sprint.
INSTINCT, THE FIRST KILLER, SHOUTED: STAND UP! FIGHT!
Every muscle burned to obey. To find the bottom. To wrestle back control.
But a deeper, older voice—the ghost of his grandfather, a man who’d fished these waters for sixty years—cut through the panic: “You cannot punch a river, boy. You must let it carry you to where it gets bored.”
With a sob of sheer defiance against his own biology, Jacques forced his body flat. He threw himself onto his back, chin to his chest, pointing his feet downstream like a sacrifice. He surrendered his fight, and in doing so, claimed his only possible victory: floatation.
The river showed him its violence. A submerged branch rammed his ribs, a blunt fist of solid water. Stones kissed his spine with malicious intent. The bank blurred past—a dizzying mural of roots and rock he could no longer reach.
Panic was a live wire in his veins, threatening to seize him, to make him turn and claw and drown.
Then, ahead—a bend. The current, thrown against the outer bank, slowed into a wide, foaming eddy. A curtain of reeds leaned into the water, green and pleading.
It wasn’t an exit. It was a negotiation.
He sucked one last breath, rolled with the last of his strength, and kicked sideways. Not against the current, but across it. The river resisted, a final show of force. Then it released him into the slower water, as if bored by his compliance.
His hands found the reeds. They cut like knives. He didn’t feel it. He seized mud, roots, the very earth itself, and hauled his body, weightless and leaden all at once, onto the bank. He vomited river.
He lay there, a beached creature, water weeping from his clothes and pores, staring at the twilight sky. The river flowed on, smooth and calm once more, its secret kept, its patient smile restored.
His clients found him there, shivering violently. No one spoke. The river had said all there was to say.
They made camp right there. At dawn, the water level had dropped six inches, revealing the sheer, sculpted wall of the drop-off that had nearly been his grave.
Wrapped in a foil blanket, his hands finally steady around a tin mug of sweet tea, Jacques gave the lesson a voice: “I didn’t beat it. You can’t. I just… stopped being a thing for it to fight. I let it show me where it was willing to let me go.”
THE QUIET TRUTH: THE SURRENDER PRINCIPLE
The greatest threats are rarely the ones that roar. They are the ones that whisper of familiarity. The path you’ve walked a hundred times. The road you know blind. The river you’ve crossed before.
Survival often hinges not on forceful resistance, but on intelligent surrender. Fighting a current drowns you. Fighting quicksand swallows you. Fighting panic blinds you.
Respect the Mask: Calmness in nature is often a performance. Look for the tension beneath the surface.
Conserve the Fight: Your energy is your primary currency. Spend it on strategic escape, not futile confrontation.
Flow, Don’t Force: Align with the power, don’t oppose it head-on. Let it reveal your window of exit.
The environment is not your enemy. It is a force. And you cannot win a wrestling match with a force. You must learn its rhythm and slip out of its grasp.
Have you ever had to surrender to a situation to ultimately overcome it? Share this story with someone who needs to remember that not all battles are won by force.
[copied with permission]
The River's Patient Smile
It was the kind of river that lulls you into a story you tell yourself: I know you.
Jacques Marais had guided clients across the lower reaches of the Olifants River a dozen times. That afternoon, with the sun bleeding orange into the thornveld and a long walk back to camp still ahead, the river looked… reasonable. Wide, yes. Brown with the tea-stain of recent rain, certainly. But its surface was a lazy, unbroken sheet of copper, sliding past with a murmur, not a roar.
“It’s fine,” he said, more to himself than to the two wide-eyed accountants from Johannesburg behind him. “Follow exactly where I step.”
The water, when it took him, was shockingly cold. A heart-stopping grip around his calves. But the gravel bottom felt firm, reassuring. See? he told the quickening beat in his chest. Just water.
His second step was the last one he took on earth that day.
The riverbed didn’t slope. It vanished.
One moment, solid ground. The next, an endless, sucking nothing. It wasn't a trip or a slip. It was an erasure. The calm brown surface had been a lie—a taut skin over a muscular, hungry dark.
The power was absolute. It didn't knock him over. It unmade his standing. The current, moving with the silent mass of a freight train, took his feet from under him and swallowed him whole.
The world inverted. Sound became a deep, churning roar. Light died to a murky, swirling brown. His mouth, opened in a gasp, filled with the taste of silt and decay. His heavy boots, his trusted boots, became anchors, snagging on a hidden skeleton of submerged roots. For a terrifying second, the river pinned him down, claiming him.
Then the leather tore. He exploded upward, breaking the surface with a ragged, screaming gasp—already twenty meters downstream and moving faster than a man can sprint.
INSTINCT, THE FIRST KILLER, SHOUTED: STAND UP! FIGHT!
Every muscle burned to obey. To find the bottom. To wrestle back control.
But a deeper, older voice—the ghost of his grandfather, a man who’d fished these waters for sixty years—cut through the panic: “You cannot punch a river, boy. You must let it carry you to where it gets bored.”
With a sob of sheer defiance against his own biology, Jacques forced his body flat. He threw himself onto his back, chin to his chest, pointing his feet downstream like a sacrifice. He surrendered his fight, and in doing so, claimed his only possible victory: floatation.
The river showed him its violence. A submerged branch rammed his ribs, a blunt fist of solid water. Stones kissed his spine with malicious intent. The bank blurred past—a dizzying mural of roots and rock he could no longer reach.
Panic was a live wire in his veins, threatening to seize him, to make him turn and claw and drown.
Then, ahead—a bend. The current, thrown against the outer bank, slowed into a wide, foaming eddy. A curtain of reeds leaned into the water, green and pleading.
It wasn’t an exit. It was a negotiation.
He sucked one last breath, rolled with the last of his strength, and kicked sideways. Not against the current, but across it. The river resisted, a final show of force. Then it released him into the slower water, as if bored by his compliance.
His hands found the reeds. They cut like knives. He didn’t feel it. He seized mud, roots, the very earth itself, and hauled his body, weightless and leaden all at once, onto the bank. He vomited river.
He lay there, a beached creature, water weeping from his clothes and pores, staring at the twilight sky. The river flowed on, smooth and calm once more, its secret kept, its patient smile restored.
His clients found him there, shivering violently. No one spoke. The river had said all there was to say.
They made camp right there. At dawn, the water level had dropped six inches, revealing the sheer, sculpted wall of the drop-off that had nearly been his grave.
Wrapped in a foil blanket, his hands finally steady around a tin mug of sweet tea, Jacques gave the lesson a voice: “I didn’t beat it. You can’t. I just… stopped being a thing for it to fight. I let it show me where it was willing to let me go.”
THE QUIET TRUTH: THE SURRENDER PRINCIPLE
The greatest threats are rarely the ones that roar. They are the ones that whisper of familiarity. The path you’ve walked a hundred times. The road you know blind. The river you’ve crossed before.
Survival often hinges not on forceful resistance, but on intelligent surrender. Fighting a current drowns you. Fighting quicksand swallows you. Fighting panic blinds you.
Respect the Mask: Calmness in nature is often a performance. Look for the tension beneath the surface.
Conserve the Fight: Your energy is your primary currency. Spend it on strategic escape, not futile confrontation.
Flow, Don’t Force: Align with the power, don’t oppose it head-on. Let it reveal your window of exit.
The environment is not your enemy. It is a force. And you cannot win a wrestling match with a force. You must learn its rhythm and slip out of its grasp.
Have you ever had to surrender to a situation to ultimately overcome it? Share this story with someone who needs to remember that not all battles are won by force.
[copied with permission]
Last edited:
A survival Story...
The Indifferent Sea
The silence was the first betrayal.
One moment, Anton van Rensburg was a man aboard Die Watermeid, his hands busy with sun-warmed nylon line, the diesel thrum of the engine a familiar heartbeat. The next, he was a sinking statue in a shock of cold green.
There was no splash. No dramatic cry. The Atlantic accepted him the way a forest accepts a falling leaf—without notice or interest. He plunged into a silent, sun-dappled world, watching the boat’s bronze hull slide away above him like a departing god.
He broke the surface into a different universe.
The roar of the wind and the retreating growl of the engine were one. Die Watermeid was already a toy on the swelling canvas of the sea, pulling away with geological indifference. He screamed her name. The wind shredded the sound and scattered it. The ocean offered only the slap of water against his own face.
This was the truth, cold and absolute: The sea was not malicious. It was oblivious. His life or death was a matter of supreme irrelevance.
The first hour was a strange, polite negotiation. Okay, he told himself, treading water in his half-inflated life jacket. This is the problem. Now solve it. The sun was a white-hot coin. His lips already cracked with salt. He assessed with a surveyor’s calm: no land, no flotsam, just the immense, breathing plain of water under a bowl of hard blue sky.
Panic, he knew, was a luxury he could not afford. It burned oxygen. It sold lies.
By the third hour, the sun became a torturer. It drilled light into his pupils, frying his thoughts. Hallucinations danced at the edge of his vision: a low smudge of land, the ghostly silhouette of a ship. He yearned to swim for them, to act. But his grandfather’s voice, seasoned with a lifetime of fishing these waters, echoed: “The sea will tempt you to chase ghosts, boy. To swim for miles to nowhere. Your job is not to find shore. Your job is to remain findable.”
He forced his burning muscles still. He floated.
He became a student of the swell. He learned its rhythm—the great, slow inhalation that lifted him to the sky, the long, sighing exhalation that dropped him into a valley of water. He moved with it, not against it. He conserved his sweat, his spit, his soul.
Night fell like a final verdict.
The cold was an invasion. It seeped through his skin and laid claim to his marrow. The stars were a million icy eyes, witnesses to a spectacle they had seen a billion times before. This was when the true enemy arrived. Not the sea. Not the cold.
It was doubt.
A soft, logical voice in the cathedral of his mind. What are you preserving yourself for? For another sunrise of thirst? For another day of this slow, chemical dissolution?
To answer it, he performed a ritual. With stiff, salt-crusted fingers, he checked the pathetic bladder of his life jacket. He tightened a strap. He smoothed the faded orange fabric. A tiny, meaningless action. It was a declaration: I am still in charge of something.
Survival, he understood then, is not a single epic act. It is a series of tiny, stubborn refusals. Refusing to drink the saltwater. Refusing to shed his clothes. Refusing to let his eyes close for too long. Refusing to give the indifferent sea the one thing it wanted: his participation in his own end.
Dawn was a grey smear when the sound came. A faint, mosquito-whine on the edge of the world. An engine. It could have been a dream.
He did not jerk. He did not scream and waste his voice on the wind. He waited, floating like a piece of driftwood, until the sound hardened into a certainty. Then, with the last coordinated effort of his body, he raised one arm. A slow, deliberate exclamation mark against the empty page of the sea.
The fishing trawler Skepper altered course by two degrees. Then five.
They hauled him aboard as the sun finally breached the horizon. He was a creature of salt and shuddering cold, unable to speak, his skin bleached and wrinkled. They wrapped him in rough blankets that felt like heaven.
Weeks later, on a steady pier, someone asked the unanswerable: “What was it that kept you alive out there?”
Anton looked at the harbour water, glittering and harmless. “I stopped being a man fighting an ocean,” he said, his voice still rough. “I became a piece of data it hadn’t accounted for. I focused not on making it save me, but on not giving it my body to erase.”
THE QUIET TRUTH: THE ECONOMY OF ENDURANCE
True survival against an indifferent force is not a battle of strength, but a test of emotional and metabolic frugality.
Conserve Everything: Your energy, your heat, your hope. Spend only what is essential for the next breath, the next hour.
Ignore False Prophets: Mirages, panic, and desperate impulses are all predators that drain your reserves. Trust in stillness.
Master the Minute: When the grand struggle is overwhelming, focus on the smallest actionable task. Adjust a strap. Count breaths. These are the anchors of sanity.
Understand Indifference: The greatest terror is not hostility, but apathy. Your will to live must be a completely internal fire; the environment will not feed it.
In the end, survival is the ultimate act of quiet selfishness—a stubborn, unglamorous, and magnificent refusal to disappear.
What's the one small, stubborn ritual that would keep your mind anchored in a vast, indifferent emptiness? Share this with someone who understands that the greatest battles are fought in silence.
The Indifferent Sea
The silence was the first betrayal.
One moment, Anton van Rensburg was a man aboard Die Watermeid, his hands busy with sun-warmed nylon line, the diesel thrum of the engine a familiar heartbeat. The next, he was a sinking statue in a shock of cold green.
There was no splash. No dramatic cry. The Atlantic accepted him the way a forest accepts a falling leaf—without notice or interest. He plunged into a silent, sun-dappled world, watching the boat’s bronze hull slide away above him like a departing god.
He broke the surface into a different universe.
The roar of the wind and the retreating growl of the engine were one. Die Watermeid was already a toy on the swelling canvas of the sea, pulling away with geological indifference. He screamed her name. The wind shredded the sound and scattered it. The ocean offered only the slap of water against his own face.
This was the truth, cold and absolute: The sea was not malicious. It was oblivious. His life or death was a matter of supreme irrelevance.
The first hour was a strange, polite negotiation. Okay, he told himself, treading water in his half-inflated life jacket. This is the problem. Now solve it. The sun was a white-hot coin. His lips already cracked with salt. He assessed with a surveyor’s calm: no land, no flotsam, just the immense, breathing plain of water under a bowl of hard blue sky.
Panic, he knew, was a luxury he could not afford. It burned oxygen. It sold lies.
By the third hour, the sun became a torturer. It drilled light into his pupils, frying his thoughts. Hallucinations danced at the edge of his vision: a low smudge of land, the ghostly silhouette of a ship. He yearned to swim for them, to act. But his grandfather’s voice, seasoned with a lifetime of fishing these waters, echoed: “The sea will tempt you to chase ghosts, boy. To swim for miles to nowhere. Your job is not to find shore. Your job is to remain findable.”
He forced his burning muscles still. He floated.
He became a student of the swell. He learned its rhythm—the great, slow inhalation that lifted him to the sky, the long, sighing exhalation that dropped him into a valley of water. He moved with it, not against it. He conserved his sweat, his spit, his soul.
Night fell like a final verdict.
The cold was an invasion. It seeped through his skin and laid claim to his marrow. The stars were a million icy eyes, witnesses to a spectacle they had seen a billion times before. This was when the true enemy arrived. Not the sea. Not the cold.
It was doubt.
A soft, logical voice in the cathedral of his mind. What are you preserving yourself for? For another sunrise of thirst? For another day of this slow, chemical dissolution?
To answer it, he performed a ritual. With stiff, salt-crusted fingers, he checked the pathetic bladder of his life jacket. He tightened a strap. He smoothed the faded orange fabric. A tiny, meaningless action. It was a declaration: I am still in charge of something.
Survival, he understood then, is not a single epic act. It is a series of tiny, stubborn refusals. Refusing to drink the saltwater. Refusing to shed his clothes. Refusing to let his eyes close for too long. Refusing to give the indifferent sea the one thing it wanted: his participation in his own end.
Dawn was a grey smear when the sound came. A faint, mosquito-whine on the edge of the world. An engine. It could have been a dream.
He did not jerk. He did not scream and waste his voice on the wind. He waited, floating like a piece of driftwood, until the sound hardened into a certainty. Then, with the last coordinated effort of his body, he raised one arm. A slow, deliberate exclamation mark against the empty page of the sea.
The fishing trawler Skepper altered course by two degrees. Then five.
They hauled him aboard as the sun finally breached the horizon. He was a creature of salt and shuddering cold, unable to speak, his skin bleached and wrinkled. They wrapped him in rough blankets that felt like heaven.
Weeks later, on a steady pier, someone asked the unanswerable: “What was it that kept you alive out there?”
Anton looked at the harbour water, glittering and harmless. “I stopped being a man fighting an ocean,” he said, his voice still rough. “I became a piece of data it hadn’t accounted for. I focused not on making it save me, but on not giving it my body to erase.”
True survival against an indifferent force is not a battle of strength, but a test of emotional and metabolic frugality.
Conserve Everything: Your energy, your heat, your hope. Spend only what is essential for the next breath, the next hour.
Ignore False Prophets: Mirages, panic, and desperate impulses are all predators that drain your reserves. Trust in stillness.
Master the Minute: When the grand struggle is overwhelming, focus on the smallest actionable task. Adjust a strap. Count breaths. These are the anchors of sanity.
Understand Indifference: The greatest terror is not hostility, but apathy. Your will to live must be a completely internal fire; the environment will not feed it.
In the end, survival is the ultimate act of quiet selfishness—a stubborn, unglamorous, and magnificent refusal to disappear.
What's the one small, stubborn ritual that would keep your mind anchored in a vast, indifferent emptiness? Share this with someone who understands that the greatest battles are fought in silence.
Real wild Rough camping & hiking in my part of the world.
[South-Africa]
Sleeping in the open on the ground next to the campfire, while teaching them the ways of the wild, on a hike to a beautiful waterfall deep in the mountains!
A. Starting the campfire with a Ferro-rod and grass & braai the meat on this fire.
B. Sitting next to this fire at the sleeping place.
C. Boiling the water for the early morning coffee in a rural folk's rugged flat bottom 'Seroot', on last nights left over wood coals!
Ready for the next day's hike!
[South-Africa]
Sleeping in the open on the ground next to the campfire, while teaching them the ways of the wild, on a hike to a beautiful waterfall deep in the mountains!
A. Starting the campfire with a Ferro-rod and grass & braai the meat on this fire.
B. Sitting next to this fire at the sleeping place.
C. Boiling the water for the early morning coffee in a rural folk's rugged flat bottom 'Seroot', on last nights left over wood coals!
Ready for the next day's hike!
My Opinion....
To me 'Bush crafting' and 'Survival' are just overused media made-up words/hype out of context, to sell a lot of unnecessary outdoor goodies to mostly inexperienced people.....
It's nothing different than normal 'CAMPING', or if you want to be a bit more of an 'Adventurist', 'Solo', 'Primitive' or 'Minimalistic', then you go 'Rough-Camping', where you practically test/sharpen-up some of your AQUIRED Gear/bush knowledge-/ camping-/ shelter-/ carving-/ water distill-/fire making-/trapping-/ fishing-/ hunting-/ camouflage-/ mental- etc. skills under 'real' field conditions outdoors!
To me 'Bush crafting' and 'Survival' are just overused media made-up words/hype out of context, to sell a lot of unnecessary outdoor goodies to mostly inexperienced people.....
It's nothing different than normal 'CAMPING', or if you want to be a bit more of an 'Adventurist', 'Solo', 'Primitive' or 'Minimalistic', then you go 'Rough-Camping', where you practically test/sharpen-up some of your AQUIRED Gear/bush knowledge-/ camping-/ shelter-/ carving-/ water distill-/fire making-/trapping-/ fishing-/ hunting-/ camouflage-/ mental- etc. skills under 'real' field conditions outdoors!
Real 'Survival' experiences for orphans...
Background
Our Unit’s SADFA (Veterans) --- South African Defense Force Association- Chaplain organized a survival camp on a huge farm, for +_60 high school boys, from two Orphanages (Gauteng and the Free State Provinces).
The group of high school boys had:
Cows from which they could get milk (if they managed to corner one)
Free-roaming chickens to eat (if they could catch them)
Chicken eggs (if they could find where the chickens had laid them)
Fish in the farm dams (if they could catch them somehow)
Meal (maize flour) (if they could make their own porridge)
Firewood (if they managed to produce a flame)
Drinking water, etc.
They therefore had everything they needed to “survive”, but the reality of “making a plan” and “thinking outside the box” broke many egos.
They knew a lot about bullying, stealing, street life, and being “pity-me” orphans.
Many gave up by day two, sitting despondent and helpless, hungry, with their heads bowed under a tree, or lying on their blankets in their DIY shelters, crying.
They only wanted to “have”, but were not willing to 'work' for what they wanted.
We, as invited retired SADFA volunteer members, then began teaching them the true principle of Army “Vasbyt” (perseverance / grit).
(Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind…)
From day three onwards, we started teaching them practical skills, such as:
Basic traps and snares
Fire-making
Building better branch shelters [Boma's]
Survival fishing
Rope-making, etc.
After a week of 'real survival situations' at the camp, they gained new and better insights into:
Life
Cooperation
Supporting one another
Listening also to the plans and ideas of the youngest or weakest in the group....
Understanding that street macho aggression does not help you to survive in the bush, etc.
They also received Spiritual (Biblical) guidance, learning about faith in Jesus and its value, from the SADFA Chaplain, who guided them daily — helping them learn how to 'survive' in everyday life back home as well.
After the camp, they only wanted to know when the next camp would be, because it was a positive life-enriching adventure to all of them!
Background
Our Unit’s SADFA (Veterans) --- South African Defense Force Association- Chaplain organized a survival camp on a huge farm, for +_60 high school boys, from two Orphanages (Gauteng and the Free State Provinces).
The group of high school boys had:
Cows from which they could get milk (if they managed to corner one)
Free-roaming chickens to eat (if they could catch them)
Chicken eggs (if they could find where the chickens had laid them)
Fish in the farm dams (if they could catch them somehow)
Meal (maize flour) (if they could make their own porridge)
Firewood (if they managed to produce a flame)
Drinking water, etc.
They therefore had everything they needed to “survive”, but the reality of “making a plan” and “thinking outside the box” broke many egos.
They knew a lot about bullying, stealing, street life, and being “pity-me” orphans.
Many gave up by day two, sitting despondent and helpless, hungry, with their heads bowed under a tree, or lying on their blankets in their DIY shelters, crying.
They only wanted to “have”, but were not willing to 'work' for what they wanted.
We, as invited retired SADFA volunteer members, then began teaching them the true principle of Army “Vasbyt” (perseverance / grit).
(Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind…)
From day three onwards, we started teaching them practical skills, such as:
Basic traps and snares
Fire-making
Building better branch shelters [Boma's]
Survival fishing
Rope-making, etc.
After a week of 'real survival situations' at the camp, they gained new and better insights into:
Life
Cooperation
Supporting one another
Listening also to the plans and ideas of the youngest or weakest in the group....
Understanding that street macho aggression does not help you to survive in the bush, etc.
They also received Spiritual (Biblical) guidance, learning about faith in Jesus and its value, from the SADFA Chaplain, who guided them daily — helping them learn how to 'survive' in everyday life back home as well.
After the camp, they only wanted to know when the next camp would be, because it was a positive life-enriching adventure to all of them!
Advice from experienced trackers, game rangers, and hunters is especially useful, covering navigation, shelter, water, and emergency situations. Sharing practical skills and “what if” scenarios can help tourists and adventurers stay safe, and this thread is a great way to preserve and exchange that knowledge.
DIY Camp bread on the coals...
DIY Camp bread on the coals...
DIY Solar camp bread in a box......
DIY Camp bread on the coals...
DIY Camp bread on the coals...
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Timbila GAME LODGE wrote on Clayton d's profile.
Hi Clayton,
Please find attached our best quote based on your request.
I’ve also included the price list for additional animals, as well as our 2026 hunting packages for your reference.
You can also click on my banner to access our website and get more detailed information about the lodge, hunting areas, and options.
Best regards,
Orso
Please find attached our best quote based on your request.
I’ve also included the price list for additional animals, as well as our 2026 hunting packages for your reference.
You can also click on my banner to access our website and get more detailed information about the lodge, hunting areas, and options.
Best regards,
Orso
Woza it has been a busy few weeks!
Here below are the updated available dates for this the 2026 season
9-28 Feb open
21-25 March open
16-24 April is open
18-13 June is open this would awake time for kudu or Buffalo hunt!
9-19 July open will be very good for Kudu or Buffalo hunt!
14-30 September is open would be perfect time for late buffalo tracking hunt
October is wide open,
please contact me for more in
Here below are the updated available dates for this the 2026 season
9-28 Feb open
21-25 March open
16-24 April is open
18-13 June is open this would awake time for kudu or Buffalo hunt!
9-19 July open will be very good for Kudu or Buffalo hunt!
14-30 September is open would be perfect time for late buffalo tracking hunt
October is wide open,
please contact me for more in
Woodcarver wrote on RAVEN ROCKS PRECISION's profile.
Just wanted to say thanks for the excellent customer service. Ordered some 9.3x62 brass and the delivery was a little short. An email through your website Contact Us link was replied to the next day with the tracking info for the correction. Good pricing coupled with great customer service will see returning customers every time. Thanks again!
No Promises wrote on swoobie's profile.
X5i scope is perfect - thanks for an easy transaction! Buy with confidence.
Made it to Augusta Georgia yesterday for a meeting, hunt bookings are looking good for 2026 and 2027, had a great time on our Alabama safari shot a rutting deer at 200 yards with 7mm PRC near Huntsville and then headed on to Butler Alabama and semi guided my first deer ever shot a very nice broken off 8 point with hunter there and spend a few days on 1100 acres hunting preserve awesome place!