I have been playing with my various spark generating toys and decided that I have been using perfectly dry tinder in an ideal situation. Built confidence and skill but had me worried about that time when I and everything else was wet.

I took a cotton ball and rubbed some vaseline on it. Worked it around a little and then tried to make sure the outside of the ball was well coated. Probably used about 3-4 peas size worth of vaseline total. I dropped it into a cup of water. It floated. I took a piece of fatwood about finger sized and pushed it to the bottom of the water. Left both in the water for several hours.

I came back and fished both out. I squeezed as much water as possible out of the cotton ball. Then I opened it up hoping to find mostly dry cotton on the inside. I made a fuzz stick of the fatwood. Then I partially split the finger sized fatwood fuzz stick into about 6 sections. I only split the fatwood about 1/3 the length. I made a few more fuzz curls on the new splits. I pulled the cotton ball apart some more and pinched it between the 6 finger splits of the fatwood. It began to look like a rake or fork with cotton spacers.

I threw some sparks from either my BSA HotSpark or SparkLite. I had both out and was playing around with both. It only took two or three strikes and the cotton caught. It flamed and caught the fatwood on fire. I had a 2-3 inch flame for several minutes between the vaseline cotton and fatwood. I only allowed it to burn down 1/3 the length of the fatwood. I was able to hold the other end of the fatwood stick with no difficulty. My son mentioned it would make an excellent torch to explore a cave or something.

Anyway I proved to myself that even if I fell overboard, swam to shore during a rainstorm, and everything around me was wet, I could get a fire going with a few simple things to carry. The flame was sufficent it would have easily dried out any small kindling collected and I could have added larger pieces to dry and burn. Alternately I could have only used half the fatwood to hold the cotton ball and the remainder split up as my kindling. A finger sized piece of fatwood would easily burn 10 minutes with a 2-3" flame.

Once you get confident with dry tinder, I recommend you try building fires in less than ideal situations with either wet tinder, gloves, or one-handed. Increase the difficulty continually. Soon, starting a fire with dry tinder will seem painfully easy.

Great post on the topic. As I gaze out the window and see the steady cold drizzle of rain continuing... and recall getting fires going while the rain comes down, how about adding that to the next level of skills? Perhaps not during a deluge, but in these typical fall/spring conditions, sheltering the process of fire starting and eventually the fire becomes an important consideration. These are routine conditions when a fire can make a huge difference.

I have not exactly replicated your experiment, so it was useful to me to read about yours.

Tom

While writing I was thinking along the similar lines. Maybe I could get my kid to squirt me with a mist bottle while I try to light a fire. Then step up to a lawn sprinkler.

I started thinking about wind direction, direction of rain, and figured I should be able to shield most of it with my body huddled over it. I plan on packing a garbage bag with the fire starting materials. Maybe I could go inside my garbage bag while starting a fire to provide a cover. Of course keeping in mind oxygen depletion and suffication factors. Maybe split open the garbage bag and improvise a small makeshift tarp covered area?

During the same testing period, I had put a cotton ball sized portion of 0000 steel wool in the water as well. After the couple hour soaking, I shook out most of the water and then blew on it. I was able to light it on the first spark. There was still some water so it did not burn as well as completely dry steel wool but only to the practiced eye. I put the steel wool on the end of a fatwood splinter about 3/4 pencil diameter. WIth a gentle puff or two I got some flames but they went out before the fatwood splinter started. I tried another portion of dry steel wool on the same splinter. Again steel wool burned but failed to light the splinter.

My conclusion to those tests was the splinter was too large and the amount steel wool too small. That is why I took the time to make the next tests with a split fuzz stick as described in the first post. I did not try any additional steel wool tests but concentrated on the wet cotton ball since it seemed more of a challenge to light wet cotton.