Coal and Fire

I've been practicing fire skills quite a bit the last few weeks. Along with the handdrill and bowdrill I've been working at getting fires with a lighter. The added difficulty being that I am out in the (damp Pacific Northwest) woods. To date I haven't managed one, but I've also not been trying to full heartedly; mostly I've just been messing around with different things to see what works. That doesn't mean it's not frustrating when I don't get a fire going though. I've tried sap and twigs, a bit of dried grass and other things the worked less well. I've been trying for a small fire, but today after some initial discoveries and frustrations I decided to go bigger. To start out with I tried burning a pitch blister (on young Douglas-Firs pitch will well up in lots of little blisters in the bark) and it worked quite well so I gathered up a bunch of it and lit it on fire on a bigger piece of bark. Unfortunately by that time my hands were pretty sticky so I was pretty clumsy in my attempts to arrange twigs on top of it and never got more than a few twigs burning at a time, and they didn't last. I gave up on that for the time being and for some reason decided to gather a bigger group of twigs (not bothering too much with how damp they were as long as they weren't obviously damp) into a bunch and held the lighter under one end and was able to get them burning together pretty well - particularly when I angled them so the fire was going up the bunch. Of course I didn't do that for long because I'm not that interested in burning all the hair off my knuckles. I didn't continue to try and get a fire going for real, but I definitely feel like I made a big step in the right direction. At least for now. When I get good at getting a fire going I want to practice until I can get a small fire going, but I guess I've got to learn to walk before I can crawl.

After I got home from my sitspot, I decided to practice handdrill while waiting for potatos to bake. I had read an additional technique on the Internet recently and wanted to try it. The technique is pretty simple: go pretty hard and fast to build up a pile of dust, then go fast but with little pressure for awhile to warm and dry things out more, then go hard and fast again a few passes down and hopefully there'll be a coal afterwards. Pretty much the first try I surprised myself by popping a coal out. I got some toilet paper for tinder and dropped it in, but was unsuccessful at coaxing it into flame. So I went back to the board and tried several more times before again managing a coal which I again failed to get into flame. I tried a few more times before getting concerned about my potatos, so instead I busted out a bowdrill coal and finally got a fire started. I think the reason I was unsuccessful with the handdrill coals is both because the coal tends to be smaller as well as having less dust to extend the coal with and also I think I blew on it too much. While blowing the bowdrill coal into flame I thought that I had fouled it up as well, but instead I let it sit in the toilet paper a while and then began blowing it again and got it to flame up.

Coals:
Bowdrill: 7 Handdrill: 3