Start Fire with a Fishing Reel
by PapaD
I have made fire with each of the three main types of fishing reels. Each requires a different approach. The spincast works best, the Spinning reel requires a more sophisticated set-up. I have used older Johnson Century reels for this in the past with good success. They worked quickly and simply. Featured in this post is an Abu Garcia spincast reel. It was neither as simple or as fast to make work. Each different reel presents a challenge to adapt them for this task. Eventually the reel did make a good ember that would easily have made flames, but only after they broke off and had to be put back on twice. If only I had filmed my initial attempts with the Johnsons.
I try to angle realistic examples of where and how and when alternative fire making needs might arise. And what raw materials might be available under each circumstance. As a lifelong fisherman, I can tell you that it is entirely plausible for a fisherman or other outdoorsman to one day run into a need to make fire having no matches available. But he would indeed have one or more fishing reels at his disposal. An experience my dad had was the inspiration for this method of making fire. I have not seen or heard of it anywhere else.
The Kuskokwim River is huge. It is the recipient of most of the watershed of a vast region of the West part of the vast state of Alaska. It is over 700 miles long. Looking at a map or a globe, a person cannot even get a hint of the vastness of the geography, nor of the harshness of the environment.
My father was the consummate outdoorsman. He was raised during the Great Depression, and his parents had passed along a lot of old-time ways as well as Native American culture--each purportedly having good measures of such blood coursing through them. He was a natural athlete--a real man's man. He had an extraordinary mind and an appetite for adventure. Although his practical pursuits had Dad as an electrical whiz working for the Federal Aviation Administration--his love of the outdoors and the extremes it had to offer found our family in the middle of the most challenging assignments he could muster--including the most remote areas of Alaska.
In 1962, my father was in a light plane crash while he and two other FAA fellows were partaking of the spectacular fishing somewhere along the Kuskowim River. I was just a kid, but as I recall they had been fishing along a remote section of the river in the middle of the maze of sloughs and coastal tundra the Alaskan bush has to offer. The fishing would have been good virtually anywhere, but they had used a gravelly bank to land. They had spent a Saturday fishing and were taking off to come home when the little Piper Cub stalled and went down before it could get very far off the ground. They suffered only superficial injuries, but the plane took a beating and there was no way of repairing it enough to get it back up.
The Kuskokwim River is huge. It is the recipient of most of the watershed of a vast region of the west part of the vast state of Alaska. It is over 700 miles long. Looking at a map or a globe, a person cannot even get a hint of the vastness of the geography, nor of the harshness of the environment. In its lower regions it is wide, too. I recall standing on the bank of the river in Bethel as a child barely able to make out the outline of the other bank. And the river goes on and on and on. With all the tributaries and possible fishing spots, finding a tiny little plane without the benefit of a flight plan is comparable to finding that proverbial needle in the hay and what-not.
No flight plan had been filed, which was standard fare during those days in the Alaskan Bush. Few people had cars, but many had planes, so it was not that big a deal to fly out into the middle of nowhere without taking adequate precautions. For the edification of my grandkids, regarding their great granddad was not flying. I feel sure that he would have taken better precautions. Dad was among the most level-headed and diligent people I have ever known. However it happened, no one knew where they were and they had to fend for themselves for days until the FAA search and rescue efforts were miraculously able to locate them. Even then, they were socked-in and had to wait a day more to be rescued.
Not all alternate fire-making endeavors are about survival. Some are just about fun and the challenge of seeing what you can make work. It is gratifying to make fire using methods that you are reasonably sure no one else on earth has ever tried.
Dad and his friends did have matches, if not lighters. They made fire and ate fish until the search and rescue folks were able to locate them and drop supplies. But if they had not had matches, or if they had ditched in the water and lost everything, or had been there long enough to run out of matches--what then? So it is not a stretch to think fishermen might get lost and need alternative ways of making fire. never fear--you presumably will still have your fishing reels.
I have used three types of fishing reels to make fire--spincast, bait-cast, and spinning reels. In this post, I feature a spincast reel converted to make fire. It is only one of the two ways I have made fire with this particular reel. I'll show the other another time. And I will show the other types of reels in the future. It doesn't hurt that I collect fishing reels--so they are not hard to come by.
Yes, this one is pretty clever. But it is not all that as some of my kids and grand-kids sometimes say. It requires individual adaptation for whatever kind of fishing reel you may have available using the basic principles of friction fire making. You would think that once you got the spindle mounted and spinning, it would be a piece of cake to make fire. It was not for me. Keeping the spindle attached was a challenge. Some reel designs lend themselves better to securely attaching the spindle than others. If you can simply take the cover and inner wind-up mechanism off and and thread the spindle onto an exposed shaft or screw, it is best.
On this reel I glued the spindle on. In a survival situation, you would have to manufacture your own glue, which is not that big a deal if you have access to sappy trees such as spruce, poplar, some maple, sweetgum, pine, or others from which you can extract pitch. You can use beeswax by itself or mixed with such saps or animal fats--but that requires what? Fire. I first used bees wax first, but it was straight bees wax; it did not hold very well. I wound up using commercial glue to get through the session. Even so, the spindle broke off twice just as I got enough heat friction to soften the wood and started getting good smoke. This is usually where friction fire methods fail because the tension becomes much greater. I did get a good ember just as the second spindle broke off from the reel.
In 1962, my father was in a light plane crash while he and two other FAA fellows were partaking of the spectacular fishing somewhere along the Kuskuwim River. I was just a kid, but as I recall they had been fishing along a remote section of the river in the middle of the maze of sloughs and coastal tundra the Alaskan bush has to offer.
I have had better success with other reel designs. I collect fishing reels and in fact write a blog on them. Some of the old Johnson Century reels and modern copies allow easier mounting of the the spindle directly onto the screw. This works much better. Each attempt is an opportunity to learn. You match your own engineering and visionary skills against what you have to work with. some ways work better than others. Some don't work at all. But when you know a bunch of different ways to make fire--you can always find at least one that will work for you under whatever circumstances you find yourself in.
Not all alternate fire-making endeavors are about survival. Some are just about fun and the challenge of seeing what you can make work. It is gratifying to make fire using methods that you are reasonably sure no one else on earth has ever tried. So how do I rate this method of making fire? With this particular reel, after the spindle had broken the second time, in a real emergency or necessity situation, I would have turned to another method that I knew would work more quickly. But for the game of seeing how many ways I can show my grand-kids to solve the problem of making fire--I rate this method way up there in terms of satisfaction. It is the real reel deal.
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