Been fishing again and I’m still catching them.
I always make a fire to keep the mosquitos away, grill sausage and make coffee.
I lost one large fish when my new telescopic rod broke!
I am also continuing work on the cabin and one wall is now insulated.
We have now finished painting the house.
We hired a skylift to get to the higher part of the house.
I have now started removing the outer panel and insulation from the cabin we have in our garden, as they are rotten.
Once I have put new boards on the outside, I will paint it the same colour as the house.I have spent some time out fishing and caught several Rainbow Trout.
We are busy painting our house at the moment, when the weather allows.
Here you can see the original colour on the lesf and the new colour on the right
I have been wanting to buy a waterproof anorak and after much discussion with friends and advice from The Bushcraft Store UK, I decided to buy a Ridgeline Monsoon Classic
So far I am very pleased with it.
We have had a bear in the forest at the back of our house recently. It is digging in ant hills to find food.
Myself and Kelly have just returned from a three day trip to Finland.
We visited the Santa Claus village in Rovaniemi where kelly got to meet Santa
and his reindeer and calves.
We then travelled to Ranua to visit a wildlife park. The wildlife park has many animals and birds from Northern Europe including;
Brown Bear
Wolverine
Grey Wolf
Muskox
Honey Buzzard
and it’s the only place in Europe (and possibly in the World) where polar Bears breed in captivity
We had a great time and fantastic weather and will be visiting Finland again.
Day 3 involved a 10km hike using compass navigation to locate four different stations in the forest. There were different workshops at each station.
Our first workshop was with Brandon Chee from Malaysia. he taught us about wilderness medicine.
Then we had a workshop with Johan Skullman about navigation and how we use it in everyday life.
Our third workshop was with Dave Canterbury and that was about making traps to procure food.
And our final workshop was with outdoor chef Kieran Creevy.
On Saturday night we had good food and drink, great company and live music.
On Sunday morning after breakfast, we all packed and headed to the bus which drove us back to Mora, where we visited the Morakniv Concept Store and while there I had my knives engraved with my name.
Many thanks to everyone involved for making it a great event, especially Karin who did much of the organisation, but I never got to thank her personally.
Here is the official video from the event.
We were 100 participants who gathered at the Morakniv factory. We were given a presentation about Morakniv, and the adventure. We met the staff and ambassadors and were then given open access to look around the factory and at the knives production.
During this time, we were also able to make our own Mora classic knives.
After looking around the factory, we were given a Mora Kansbol, a Eldris and a Mora 106.
We were then driven by bus to the adventure camp.
We all set up our shelters for the weekend (mine was a hammock and tarp).
And later we all gathered for a meal and spent the evening together.
On day two half of the participants chose three workshops to attend. I choose;
Making a Birch bark ladle with Beth Moen
Fly-fishing with Emilie Björkman (this picture of the fly I tied was unfortunately the only picture I had time to take during the workshop)
but here is a link to Emilie’s website.
My final workshop was with Shuuei Nagano from Japan.
He taught us how to make a traditional chopping board
It was my birthday on day two and also the birthday of Iris Canterbury and we received a nice cake from the staff at Morakniv.
The rest of the evening was spent with good beer, good whiskey and good company.
I had a fantastic time at the Morakniv Adventure 2019 and I would like to thank all the Morakniv staff, ambassadors and participants for making it a great event. Unfortunately I have not had time to process my photo’s yet, but here are three short films from YouTube about tha event and I will right more soon.
