Hello everyone

This is my first post on this forum, though I have been a fan of Equipped to Survive for some time.

I'd like to tell you about a couple of equipment failures I had on a recent trip in case it might be of help.

I'm a Brit: I qualified as a Royal Air Force combat survival officer more years ago than I care to remember and I spent a lot of time out of doors with the Territorial Army after retiring from the RAF, so I am reasonably confident in bivouacking and so on.

Time passes and we get soft, so a friend and I decided we would do a little walking in the North Pennines. For those of you in the US who are unfamiliar with our UK hills I would say that, apart from the altitude, they are comparable with the Medicine Bow range, or the Bighorns, both of which I had the pleasure of walking in last year. Anyway, these were summer walks and there was no real problem from the weather.

The problems I had were to do with fire lighting.

The first was that the wind proof 'lifeboat' matches I had taken failed to produce any flame - they just smouldered, producing lots of smoke but emphatically no fire. These were matches from UK ration packs, NATO part number 9920 99 737 1041. I checked the dates on the packages and they were all dated 1995. Beware, therefore - these matches deteriorate with the passage of time.

The second problem was with hexamine solid fuel. I have used this quite happily on exercise for years, but this time I found it amazingly difficult to light. Again, the packs I was using were quite old souvenirs of my soldiering days. My companion is a chemist by profession and he told me that hexamine will absorb water if it is given the chance. That would account for the difficulty in lighting and the spluttering once it was lit. The good news is that it will dry out again, given a warm, dry environment. I suppose the lesson here is to keep your solid fuel in a warm, dry store and keep it in a waterproof bag when you set out.

The final problem was that my 'jet' butane lighter ran out of fuel. I have always felt that the refuelling process is very hit and miss with these - you have no way of knowing whether or not you have achieved a satisfactory refill. And I obviously didn't.

Anyway, we managed satisfactorily because I had also taken a disposable butane lighter and an MSR 'Pocket Rocket', both of which operated flawlessly. In fact, I lit the PR in order to get the hexamine going so that I could use it with the Kelly kettle - a bit of a rigmarole, but illustrative of the value of having backups for backups, I think.

Despite all this, and some questionable weather, we had a brilliant couple of days on what I believe is the best section of the Pennine Way, from Garrigill to the Cow Green reservoir.

The beer at the Langdon Beck pub is excellent!