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Preparing your fire
As the saying goes, "Fail to prepare, prepare to fail." You must plan and prepare your fire carefully before lighting, how many of us take our Scouts firelighting, show them how to do it correctly, then watch them run around the camp area looking for wood and feeding match after match into a worthless pile of tinder.
Fuel should be graduated into piles from kindling through to main fuel and logs. Tinder should be dry and as fine as you can get it, hence my recommendation for Cotton Wool. It could also be Birch bark or dried grasses or leaves. Consider the fluffy downy heads of plants which are available in Autumn as tinder, look at a Thistle plant to see what I mean. Your tinder should be dry and fluffy. If it is not then buff it up by twisting it and rubbing it between your hands using circular movements. Build it up until you have a nice big fluffy ball of tinder.
Kindling comes next, fine twigs which are thin enough to catch light easily. If there is no kindling available consider shaving pencil thick twigs finely into "fuzz" sticks, these can work just as well. If you use really long pieces of wood about 12 inches (That's 30 cm) long and feather these then you can bypass the tinder and kindling stage in one go. This is a common technique in Scandinavia where kindling can be scarce. You need to make sure that these feathers are really curly and thin enough that they can be lit from one match. One quick aside is that it is a tradition in the hunting lodges over there that if you use the lodge you leave the fire place cleaned out with six feather sticks bundled together ready to light and a box of matches with a couple sticking out the box so that a walker or hunter on the verge of hypothermia can light a fire with frozen fingers, which is not possible when you cannot open the match box.
Now build up from pencil thick twigs to pieces as thick as your grip between thumb and forefinger. This thickness is all that would be required for a quick fire to enable cooking to commence quickly, but for an established camp you will need fuel thicker still. Do not cut this into convenient log sizes, just leave it as a length and end feed it into the fire or lay it across to burn through, let the fire do the work for you. Remember, in survival or bushcraft you have to watch your calorie expenditure and cutting wood just so it is the right size is pointless.
Once you have prepared your fire, use your match, coal or whatever to light your tinder. Build it up a step at a time if required.
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