re: alone tv show, what 10 Items ?

everyone has always taken one. I'd consider it, on very wet vancouver island. But really, you can "bed" your coals in ashes/dirt and keep it "alive" for 10 hours or more. If you put a primitive shelter over it, and keep it dampened, you should only need to start half a dozen fires from "scratch" at most, in 90 days. Once you have the first fire, you can have ashes and charred punk wood, kept dry in a tarp/tape bag, along with pine resin, chaga, etc, so that you can easily start a fire with any hard, sharp rock and any carbon steel tool. you can also make a big McElroy pump drill. It features a removable spindle head and you can dovetail in a removable hearth-contact, too. So only that piece and the spindle head need to be dry, soft wood. the rest of the spindle can be hard, green, even damp wood

LINK


you can use 6" long, 3" OD logs for the counterweights, not stones. they need to weigh the same, you see. you can have notched double sticks for the handle and a notch atop the spindle, too, so that you dont have to drill any holes.

here's how to bed your fire

LINK

fowler, winner of season 3 has a yt vid about how he made a 1 pint water bottle out of wood. Took him all day, If you fold and tie the wrist of a sleeve of the rainsuit jacket., and then also tie it off at the armpit, you have a 1 gallon water containerin in 2 minutes, and there's no need to cut up the rainsuit jacket, either. I emailed him about that and he sort of went "duh". :-)

He also spent several days building a dock to fish from, instead of one day building a pontoon outrigger raft. He also spent a week building handrails and steps so that he could safely get uip and down the very steep hells to his section of beach. If he'd had the raft, he could have used it to move all of his stuff further down the lake shore, where there were no such cliffs and also fished from the anchored raft. His dock got swamped when the height of the lake water rose several feet after a heavy rain. They get 2 months from being told that they are on the show, before they actually fly to the site. Plenty of time to give all this a lot of thought. But they dont.

On 50k a year, you can live like a king in cambodia, Nicaraugua, Croatia. to include a live in cook/maid and her chauffer/gardener husband. 2k per year each to the police chief and the mayor will make you a cop, so you can have an AR-15 in your vehicle, can CCW a pistol,have a badge and powers of arrest. Being armed and being a cop goes a LONG ways towards eliminating the worries that ex-pats have about living in such countries.

The boarding houses are what provide my income. Once you get 3 of them, you can hire a property management company to watch over your live-in managers, and you dont have to live in that area any more.

wtf said that you have to, twit? I just said that 50k suffices to live like a king there, and I also noted a country in S America and one in Europe. There's dozens more, but they'll cost you about 20k a year more, like Chile, uruquay, Portugal, Crete. If you surrender your US citizenship, you dont have to pay US taxes on your income there, either.

I never watched the show. Do you know where you are going?
A couple of good Knives and plenty of really good string, are sure fire friends.

I'm a fan of the show, and I think you underestimate the most difficult part of "Alone". It's not maintaining food, shelter, and water--a fair number of contestants are quite good at that. But they can't handle being away from family (esp their children) and SO for weeks/months. And the efficiency in projects you proclaim only means more idle time--that is what will get you. It's as much (or more) a mental battle than a battle against the elements.

you are only allowed a max of 4 lbs of food. Many things are not allowed. No guns, bugnetting, bug spray, water filter, lighter, modern snares, no compound bow,arrows have to be made of wood. No fishing lures or reel, no water filter, no machete no steel traps, no poison. Follow the link of my OP, to see the list of allowed items.

You know where you're going at least a month before you go. you can have ONE knife and a multitool. The max size cookpot is 2 qts, but there's no size limit on the skillet. Season 3, Nichole took a 4 qt skillet and amazon sells a 5 qt skillet with a LID. There's nothing in the rules prohibiting a skillet's having a lid, but they've all been too dumb to take this obvious advantage.

You are limited to 40m of paracord, 10m of rope, One spool of snare wire. 900 ft of fishline, and it has to be monofilament, not bankline nor braided line. No wire leaders are allowed, cause you can make snares out of them (I guess). You are limited to 25 fishhooks and you can't take a yo-yo reel, either.

You are limited to how much and what types of clothing you can take. For your own good, they wont let you take a down sleeping bag. A couple of people have nearly died when a down bag got wet, on Vancouver Island. A bivvy sack or sleeping bag cover is considered one of your 10 items.

17 lbs of pemmican will only feed you for 17 days, maybe 25 days, if all you do is lay around in a sleeping bag (if it's cold, wet and windy, like it always is on Vancouver Island). This is if you dont lose bodyweight. On season one, Alan Kay lost a lb per day and EVERYONE has lost an average of 1/2 lbs per day. That's 1500 calories per day that they did NOT eat. Pemmican is by far the best choice out of the allowed items, but you can only take 2 lbs of it. The next best choice is gorp, and it's the same number of calories per lb and makes better bait for birds.

A big guy can easily burn 5000 calories per day, working long, hard days in such conditions. Pemmican is 2500 calories per lb. When they are in training, top swimmers have to eat 10,000 calories per day. That's not a mis-print or typo, and they AINT fat, either.

Nobody's arrowed or trapped more than about 10 lbs of game in 5 seasons. Nobody's caught more fish than Fowler and he caught 50 lbs of fish in 87 days of trying, on a lake. Dave N broke or lost 8 of his 9 arrows and starved-out in 37 days. You can't roam more than about a 5 square mile area. Your drop off point is picked by lottery. You are GROSSLY limited by the fact that you have to film everything that you do. Other than gulls and ducks (and then only on the island) there's been no critters of enough numbers/size to live on. A couple have had a chance to arrow a bear, but didn't take a bow. Season 5, britt had a chance at a deer, but missed, 3x. Dunno what the range was. Nobody's had sense enough to take flu flu fletching on their arrows.

The fact is that netting is the only way to get enough food. You'll be thoroughly sick of fish within the first week, but you're clearing $3000 a day out there, so chomp that fish and cambium, drink that kelp juice, and smile all the way to the bank.

you wouldn't last 2 weeks on Vancouver Island with just flint and steel,knife and pot, in the late fall when they drop you off. Nobody could. They have weeks in a row of constant rain, and it's COLD, windy, etc. VI gets 140+ inches of rain each year, with more of it in the fall/winter, of course. So figure on 20" of rain per month while you're there. Your primitive shelter will have to hold up 500+ lbs of wet debris. :-) You'll be soaked thru for days while you try to build such a shelter, and hypothermia and/or pneumonia will soon down you.

Lots of vids about what they've faced.

LINK

You dont want to be chopping in wet, cold, windy, steep, boulders, slimy conditions, folks. 2 people have cut themselves badly on this show and had to be evacced. Two more have hurt themselves badly by falling. If you know what you're doing, you dont need that much firewood and you dont need a cabin. You only need a doubled-tarp shelter on Vancouver, cause it rarely freezes. A cabin wont suffice in Mongolia, cause you wont have the stored food needed to give you energy to gather enough firewood to keep it heated. You need to be in a dugout shelter, with a foot thick layer of compacted dry grass around and above you, and 2 ft of it packed under you. Given warm clothing and a sleeping bag, you wont need a fire. you can take at least 5 gallons of water in the dugout with you, in the rainsuit. It wont freeze because of the insulation and your body heat. Your mouse-trap bucket becomes your waste bucket. Dry your wastes with dirt, of course. Emerge once a week, to melt ice/snow for drinking water, and to dispose of wastes. Before the first hard freeze, dig a 1 ft deep, 2x2 ft hole, line it with a tarp, so that you can stone boil in it, to melt the ice for drinking water.

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you wouldn't last 2 weeks on Vancouver Island with just flint and steel,knife and pot, in the late fall when they drop you off. Nobody could.

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I'd take that bet.

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They have weeks in a row of constant rain, and it's COLD, windy, etc.

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Not that cold.

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VI gets 140+ inches of rain each year, with more of it in the fall/winter, of course.

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Is that it?

Portions of the Oregon and Washington coast get 200+.

Not saying it would be easy but I know I could survive a mere 2 weeks.