The Survival Fishing Kit – Fishing With Nothing
When you’re out in the middle of nowhere fending for yourself, sustaining yourself quickly becomes your top priority. Not in the I-need-a-sandwich-I’m-famished kind of way, but a more primal, life-threatening hunger that you don’t want to tempt.
In most survival guides, the first recommendation you get is to find local plant life that can be eaten. This includes roots, leaves, stalks, shoots, berries, and other materials. The problem is that, if you don’t have previous knowledge (or internet access, but if you have that, you probably aren’t too lost anyways), then you’re probably not going to be able to safely consume plants because you don’t know which plants/parts are going to sustain you and which are going to kill you. To further complicate this process, preparation is as important as what the plant is itself: Can I eat these leaves raw? Do I need to boil these roots?
So what are some other options? Well, you could always hunt. Contrary to popular movies, however, effective bow and arrow setups aren’t easily fashioned from a few twigs, and trapping animals is not at all a surefire method if you don’t have proper supplies on hand, not to mention previous practice. So what’s left? How about some good old fashioned fishing, eh? Fishing not only can supply you with a good stock of healthy sustenance, it can also be much more easily planned for and implemented than other methods of catching live food. Let’s look at what a bare-bones survival fishing kit should include.
First and foremost, the fishing rod itself. Lucky for you, this is one element that we can do with minimal effort or packing. In fact, you won’t pack anything at all! Compared to the other elements of a fishing setup, a commercially produced fishing rod is rather unnecessary, especially for small lake or river fishing – the most common environments a survivalist will find themselves fishing in. The bottom line: You can use a stick. Seriously, this is the one thing from movies that really works. So, all you need to pack for a rod, is, um, nothing.
Line: The line you carry in your kit is probably the most important item because it limits what you can catch. Small pan fish can be caught with a low “test” (tensile strength) of line, but anything much bigger might cause it to snap. Braided lines, instead of those with just a single core, are a little more expensive but have much higher tensile strength than their counterparts. Keeping several hundred feet of this stuff on hand is not difficult, and will expand the weight range of fish you can catch. The thickness of the braided line can also be masked by buying a fluorescent variety, which makes the line nearly invisible in water.
Last but not least – hooks and bait. Hooks are going to be stronger and harder to spot if you use commercially produced ones, though bone, paper clips and other materials can also be fashioned to work. A simple straight or treble hook will do the trick. For bait, live bait is generally very effective and digging up some worms (you can break them in half or into pieces to get more use out of each one and to make them more enticing to smaller fish) is not too difficult. Alternatively, insects and entrails of other fish/animals can be used as effective bait. What’s in your survival fishing kit?
Category: Wilderness Skills
