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Tomahawk - Scouts Out!
The life and adventures of a perpetual traveler. With a few survival and fieldcraft skills thrown in.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Olson Iron works Rail Road spike Knife
Tomahawk - Scouts Out!
Saturday, September 20, 2014
FREE EBOOK from Jeff Olson
Check it out! get your free ebook "Contractor secrets revealed" from none other then Jeffrey M. Olson, the 2nd most snaggle toothed, piratical, bacon chawin, sumbidge to walk the walk....
http://shtfartofwar.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/contractor-secrets-revealed-free-book/
You will enjoy this FREE BOOK.
Tomahawk, Scouts Out!
Friday, September 19, 2014
The Tracker knife by Jason Hawk - The "Hell Hound" Scout
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The drop rig is made out of ww2 surplus, horse halters,mouse pads, and an AK pouch.
I really like the Mad Max meets the Flintstones look of this blade. It is lighter and more functional than the current commercial Tracker blades. Jason is making a limited run of 10 of these blades. They will not be cheap but a hand forged quality blade is worth the price.
It's companion is a modified Mel Deweese. It is Made from a saw blade with tire handles. For more information on these blades and scout classes with the Tomahawk scout or Hell-hound scout schools, contact Jason Hawk at the email posted below.
jasonhawkknives@yahoo.com
See you on the trail!
Tomahawk - Scouts Out!
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Rodney Ansell, the real "Crocodile Dundee"
Typical of hollywood and TV types. Having dealt with Dick-scovery channel on a goat fuck of a TV show of my own, I can see how Hogan stole the idea of his character from Rodney.
None the less, Rod Ansell was a bushman after my own heart. I can appreciate how he survived in the bush for 71 days, alone without much gear. I was going to write a full blown narrative about this man and his survival trek etc. but, In my research I uncovered some pretty good write ups on wikipedia and in another article from 1988 written by Margot Dougherty. Ill include a link from wikipedia and a copy/paste of the other here.
This cat was pretty cool, he lived a rough life on the edge, never fully entering main stream Australian society , but Im sure he found the freedom of his chosen lifestyle appealing to say the least.
Tomahawk - Scouts Out!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Ansell
MEET ROD ANSELL by; Margot Dougherty
What's left of the battered green 1985 Toyota is bouncing along at 60 mph, no road in sight. The goggled demon at the wheel is heading straight for a towering thatch of young gum trees, and he has got the accelerator soldered to the floor with his bare foot. There's no windshield on the speeding wreck—no roof or doors, for that matter—and the constant whorl of dust is blinding. But the madman smashes through the trees, unleashing a shower of unhappy green ants who bite viciously through his fatigues. Oblivious, he careens through a dried riverbed, scales its four-foot perpendicular bank, resumes the race on open plain and closes in on his lumbering quarry: a 900-lb. feral water buffalo. With a nudge from the Toyota's bull bar—a specially rigged fender—the beast's hind legs buckle and it drops. Throwing on the brake, Rod Ansell, about 5'8" and pushing 125 lbs. after a good meal, hops out, wedges his knee into the animal's shoulder and ropes its tire-threatening horns. "I think," drawls the white hunter with an Aussie accent, "we've caught ourselves a buffalo."
Welcome to Australia's Top End—the wild, wild north of what may well be the world's last continental frontier. And meet your host, Rod Ansell, the buffalo catcher, cattle tosser and Aussie back-bushman who claims his own adventures triggered the creation of Mick J. "Crocodile" Dundee.
Rod doesn't tango with 17-foot crocs or sport a necklace made of their teeth. And the only thing that gets him to the Bark Hut Inn—a watering hole 50 minutes down a dirt road from his homestead—is a mail or grocery pickup. In fact, Rod, 33, doesn't care for beer, mobs or shoes. Last time he put on a pair was before boarding a plane. The ticket taker "said something about germs," Rod recalls. "I said I bet the bottom of my feet were a lot cleaner than the bottom of his shoes—I watch where I walk. He said, 'Right, mate, probably are.' " Rod wore thongs up the ramp, then chucked them.
So what does this Daniel Boone from Down Under have in common with the star of "Crocodile "Dundee? Superficially, both are handsome, blond, blue-eyed samplings of male Australiana who tend to fib about their height: Hogan gets measured with his boots on, and Ansell lays claim to an inch or two that aren't rightfully his. Other than that, they're as disparate as the Polo Lounge and the pub at Humpty Doo—a roadside attraction on the three-hour drive from Darwin to Rod's. But compare Rod to Hogan's "Croc" character, and there are more similarities.
In 1977 Ansell was stranded for two months on a deserted stretch of river in the Northern Territory. After his rescue, word of his wily survival—we'll get to that later—spread. He re-enacted the misadventure for a 1978 documentary that is still aired on TV, and he co-wrote a book, To Fight the Wild. In 1980 TV host Michael Parkinson invited Rod to Sydney to chat about his episode on his "talk-back show."
When "Crocodile" Dundee came out six years later, "people started ringing me up and saying they saw all these similarities between my experience and the movie," Rod says. Ringing up? Not exactly, He and his wife, Joanne, also 33, and their two sons, Callum, 8, and Shaun, 6, live on a rustic homestead called Melaleuca about 10 miles from the closest phone—an outdoor booth at a slaughterhouse. They communicate by radio. Still, they went to check out the film. "An excellent movie, hey?" Rod says. "Good fun. But it was so obvious where he got his material from." Not that Rod cared—until early last year.
That's when he and Dominick Macan, an adventure-tour planner Ansell picked up hitchhiking in the Territory in '86, decided to go into business. Macan, who works with Ocean Voyages in Sausalito, Calif., thought Rod's setting would make a good vacation spot. Convinced, Rod made a call to Hogan's office in Sydney to ask permission to bill himself as the "real Crocodile Dundee" in his promotional brochures. Rod got back a letter from Hogan's partner, John Cornell. "Sorry mate," it read in part, "but you cannot use 'Crocodile Dundee' in any advertising either in Australia or the U.S.A. Lawyers from Paramount and Rimfire Films [Hogan's company] would descend on you from a great height."
"I really can't understand their position," says Rod. "I explained very carefully that I was willing to sign a piece of paper saying I had no rights to royalties. All I want is the right to say what they've already said: that Hoges got the idea from myself. It could really help my little thing here." In an early radio interview, Rod claims, Hogan cited the Parkinson interview as the spark that fired his Dundee creation. No transcript of the radio show exists, but newspaper interviews with Cornell and Ken Shadie, the balance of the Dundee script-writing team, made the connection for posterity. In July of '86 Shadie told a reporter that having seen Rod on TV, Hogan "thought this was the ideal character for [himself]." Memories of Rod have since faded in movieland. "All I can say is the story came from Paul Hogan," Shadie says now. "The idea for 'Crocodile' Dundee came from Paul Hogan's head," says a spokesman for Cornell.
Rod was disappointed but undaunted. His brochure, written by Macan, cites him as the "bushman superstar" who inspired the movie "Crocodile" Dundee. What if Paramount should make good on Cornell's threat? "Well, I guess they'd win, wouldn't they?" shrugs Ansell. "They've got more money, hey?" Wife Joanne, a soft-spoken Melbourne native, stands firmer. "I think Hogan's being really bad mannered," she says. "Let him try whatever he likes. We'll stand up and knock him back down again."
Whether Rod's story is filmlore, folklore or remarkable fact, it's a yarn worth spinning. In May 1977, after a cattle-catching job in Kununurra, Western Australia, Rod decided to take a fishing trip. He entered the Victoria River with an 18-foot motorboat, a nine-foot dinghy, two bull terriers and some canned food and water. As an idyllic first day drew to a close, a large croc capsized his boat, sending him careening into the current, along with his dogs and provisions. The main boat was lost, but the dogs and dinghy survived, as did Rod's swag (a grungy canvas bedroll), rifle, knife, a can of powdered milk, another of peas and a box of wet matches. After a night of drifting out to sea, he washed up on an island off the shore of the Fitzmaurice River, north of the Victoria.
Then his real adventures began. It took two days to find fresh water upriver. When excruciating heat depleted his body's salt supplies, he says he shot a wild cow and sucked blood from its neck before curing the meat. When he craved sugar, he captured tiny bees hovering over his dogs' water tin and, webbing a strand of cotton from his shirt around their legs, followed the flying string to their hive and honey. Savvy about the wiles of crocodiles, he was careful to change his habits daily to prevent their snacking on his dogs when he was away hunting. Finally, after seven weeks, Rod heard horse-bells tinkling and was rescued by two aborigines and a white man gone walkabout from a reserve 140 miles away.
Even in the rough-and-tumble world of the Outback, Rod's ordeal made big news. In some eyes he was a hero. In others he was an elaborate storyteller. "I've been lost in the bush but never been tempted to drink cow's blood," sniffs one old-timer. "That's going too far." Others wondered just what Rod was fishing for in crocodile country—poaching is punishable by a $2,000 fine and/or six months in prison. But for the Aussie TV audience, this wry-humored anachronism who gave cattle-tossing tips and claimed to be an honorary aborigine was a charming glimpse of a culture gone by. For Rod, who flew to Sydney for the show, urban customs were no less exotic.
"I had been living in a rough camp," he recalls, "and Parkinson's people picked me up at a mission airstrip and dumped me at the Sebel Town House in Sydney—the flashiest place they could find." (The hotel is the city's answer to the Plaza, where the movie Croc stayed in New York.) Still, Rod adapted to the show's limo (another Croc scenario). He befriended the driver and directed him to Toyota dealerships to find a differential for Rod's "motorcar." The next day, the maid found the differential next to his swag—which lay on the floor next to the bed. (Sound familiar, Crocsters?) "She cleaned around it," deadpans Rod.
These days, Rod makes do back at Melaleuca. Buffalo catching, his main line of work, is a backbreaker. In exchange for cheap rent—under $16,000 a year for 60,000 acres abutting Kakadu National Park, billabongs (ponds) and rain forests included—the Northern Territory government requires that he rid his property of the wild, often tubercular buffalo and repopulate it with a domestic TB-free herd. Buffalo meat, usually exported, is an important part of the Northern Territory economy. So far he says he's caught more than 2,000 animals and has only 500 to go. None too soon. "It's one thing to catch a few buffs," he says. "I really enjoy that. But it's another to go flat out seven days a week. The novelty can wear off." The physical toll may not. Rod has broken an arm, toe, foot, shoulder and assorted hand bones, cracked his collarbone "heaps of times" and chipped his elbow. Ansell says he'd like to get into more domestic work.
To date, Rod and Joanne have had exactly two paying guests at Melaleuca, named for the paper bark trees that cover it. "It was like going back 100 years," says Bob Koch, a San Francisco newlywed who spent five days there in April on his honeymoon. Joanne—who helps with the buffalo catching, dug the 10-foot-deep ditch for the septic tank and can hold her own under a Toyota hood—has been leading their home improvement program. They've added two guest rooms to their corrugated iron-roofed home, have "proper lights with switches," fans, and, when the newly installed water pump is working, a shower, tub and toilet. "We've gotten quite flash," Rod laughs. The cement-floored common room is spare, but there are idiosyncratic homey touches: an alligator skull, dried buffalo horns, cassettes ranging from Ravel to Meat Loaf and a punching bag dangling from the ceiling. Outside, winged wildlife abounds: sulphur-crested cockatoos, wedge-tailed eagles and lorikeets. Wallabies are everywhere—including on the dinner plate—as are brumbies (wild horses), boar, buffalo and dingoes.
"I can't see us ever going into town," says Joanne, who met Rod while she was working on an aboriginal reserve in the Territory. Rod grew up in southern Queensland, the third of four children born to parents who later raised cattle. By his own admission, he was a "shocking student," interested more in filling the garage with shoe boxes of silkworms and the backyard with his 14 pet wallabies than in grammar. At 17, he left home and learned to toss cattle. The trick involves wrapping the animal's tail around your hand and feinting one way and the other until it, weighing close to a ton and very angry, trips over itself and falls. (We don't suggest trying this at home.) He crisscrossed the Territory plying his trade on a series of cattle stations and aboriginal missions until securing the lease for Melaleuca in 1985. Not even the tempting Linda Kozlowski is likely to lure Rod into the urban jungle. "All those people jammed into one place," he says, shaking his head, though a few checking into Melaleuca for a week at $1,000 each wouldn't be bad.
As for the specter of a Paramount lawsuit, Ansell adopts a "no worries" attitude. "I'll take that when it comes, as it comes, if it comes," he says, lamenting what he considers a lack of courtesy. "I mean it's not like Hoges ever called me up and said, 'Hey Rod, mind if I use bits and pieces of your story?' When I asked, I thought he'd say, 'Yeah, sure mate, go ahead.' But it didn't happen like that at all, hey?"
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
The Ice Explorer
The Ice Explorer
See you on the trail!
Tomahawk – Scouts Out!
Yate Alba,and sail boat Polaris in Chile
Yate Alba,and sail boat Polaris in Chile
it was a great trip, I was assigned a birth in the bow of the Alba and we set sail in the early hours of the morning. The sound of the waves breaking on the bow woke me up , so, I wandered around the boat for a while and was invited to the bridge by Captain Alec for a cup of coffee. From the bridge I could see a very beautiful scene coming into the light of dawn. Chile is perhaps the prettiest place I have ever seen.
Captain Tomas met us about 12 hours later with the polaris and we tied up together, to swap lies , have dinner and generally have a good time.
You can reach the Captain of the Alba at ; www.yatealba.cl, and Im sure Alec will know how to get in touch with Tomas. Both Boats are beautiful and comfortable. The cook on the Alba made some of the tastiest gourmet meals I have ever eaten. There was plenty of booze, coffee, and company. All in all , it was a good trip and one that I would like to do again.
Tomahawk – Scouts Out!
John Fairfax – RIP
John Fairfax – RIP
He will be missed.
http://gawker.com/5886695/john-fairfax-loved-hookers-ten-juicy-stories-omitted-from-his-nyt-obit
If you have never heard of John please take the time to learn about his adventures , and perhaps raise a glass of whatever you have, to one of the most colorful explorers to tramp the globe.
Tomahawk – Scouts Out!
John Fairfax (rower)From Wikipedia,
John Fairfax (21 May 1937 – 8 February 2012) was a British ocean rower and adventurer who, in 1969, became the first person to row solo across an ocean. He subsequently went on to become the first to row the Pacific Ocean (with Sylvia Cook) in 1971/2.
Early life [edit]Fairfax was born 21 May 1937 in Italy to an English father and Bulgarian mother.[1] As a child he was expelled from the Italian Boy Scouts for opening fire, with a revolver, on a hut containing other Scouts.[2] Soon after, he and his mother moved to Argentina where, aged thirteen, he left home to live in the jungle “like Tarzan”, surviving by hunting and bartering skins with local peasants.[2] Also as a teenager, he read of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo’s famous row across the Atlantic Ocean (then the only ocean to have been rowed) and knew that someday he would row across the Atlantic.
At the age of 20 Fairfax attempted “suicide-by-jaguar”. He was later apprenticed to a pirate and also briefly managed a mink farm.[3]
Travels in Americas [edit]In 1959 he flew to New York and drove across America to San Francisco. When he ran out of money, Fairfax decided to return to his mother in Argentina by bike. He got as far as Guatemala and then hitchhiked on to Panama. After a brief spell as a sailor on a Colombian boat he returned to Panama where he fell in with pirates and ended up spending three years smuggling guns, whiskey and cigarettes. After a dramatic escape from the pirates and the authorities, he returned to Argentina on horseback.
Back in Argentina he first read of Chay Blyth and John Ridgway’s successful row across the Atlantic and realised that if he wanted to be the first person to row solo across the Atlantic he would have to do it soon.
Atlantic crossing [edit]After returning to England it took Fairfax two years to prepare for the row. On 19 July 1969 he became the first person to row solo across an ocean when he arrived in Florida having set off from the Canary Islands. The self-righting and self-bailing boat “Britannia”, now located in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall[4] was designed by Uffa Fox.[2] The row took 180 days. Upon completion of his row he received a message of congratulations from the crew of Apollo 11 who had walked on the moon the day after he had completed his voyage. In their letter the crew stated:
“Yours, however, was the accomplishment of one resourceful individual, while ours depended upon the help of thousands of dedicated workers in the United States and all over the world. As fellow explorers, we salute you on this great occasion.”[2]
Pacific crossing [edit]Two years later in 1971 he set off with Sylvia Cook from San Francisco in an attempt to row across the Pacific Ocean. Cook had replied to a personal ad that Fairfax had put in The Times when looking for support for his first row.[2] The pair arrived at Hayman Island in Australia 361 days later, in the process becoming the first people to row across the Pacific, and Cook becoming the first woman to row across an ocean.
Later life [edit]He was featured on This Is Your Life in January 1970.
He and his wife moved to Las Vegas in 1992 after a hurricane hit Florida.[5]
Fairfax died on 8 February 2012, at the age of 74 in Henderson, Nevada.[6]
Sese Hammocks from the Philippines
Sese Hammocks from the Philippines
Recently , while traveling in the Philippines I met the Sese brothers in Mainla to purchase some of the quality knives they make and sell there. Anyhoo, long story short….Alf had 2 of his hand made hammocks in the trunk of his car for me to look at. I was instantly impressed by the quality of craftsmanship and materials on both of the model hammocks. I purchased the most heavy duty of the 2 from Alf (see pic) and am currently using it while instructing at the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School in Masardis, maine www.jackmtn.com .
if you are interested in one of the Quality hammocks or knives the Sese brothers make & sell you can contact them directly on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/177563835718142/?fref=ts
I will list the specs of the hammocks I have below;
Specs of the hammock are as follows:
Fly sheet size: 10′x10′ (square)
material: 210D (PU coated)
color: ranger green
Hammock size: Asymetrical
material: nylon camo pattern (uncoated)
Nylon webbing: 2 lengths of 3/4″ wide x 10yrds long
flat webbing
Repairable ridge line, #8 full-length coil zippers on
each side, removable overhead ridge line
pouches, full netting that can be opened on both
sides.
See you on the trail!
Tomahawk – Scouts Out!
Pics from my recent visit to the Jack Mountain Bushcraft school
Pics from my recent visit to the Jack Mountain Bushcraft school
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