Bug Out Boat Survival

Preparedness Brings Peace of Mind.-2-2

By just mentally picturing all of the “cool and essential survival stuff” we preppers often have on hand in our gear and food stashes, it’s not hard for us to imagine at all the new detailed and debated threads of a “Bug Out Boat Essentials List” popping up in the preparedness forums. That is because now we have a cube and weight as for the size of a Tetra Pod boat to go off of as preppers and vie for the title of best annotated list of stuff that needs floating around in that particular boat.

It’s bad enough with the bug out bag lists of heavy stuff most folks shouldn’t be carrying on their backs but that’s also like comparing a well stocked tackle box for fishing vs. a survival fishing kit. It all boils down to what you are trying to accomplish be it catch a certain type of fish needing specific gear or just a load light enough to get to your bug out location where you have a full tackle box and food stored.

Sam had a pretty good selection of canned goods like flour and additives like gluten, baking powder, etc, spaghetti, cornmeal, sugar, cereals etc. that were scattered about his Prepper Shack for tortilla making (you can put anything on a tortilla or in a taco, even rabbit, squirrels and fish) and other food stuffs that he figured were now classified as luxuries for holidays, birthdays and just easy living that extended his supplies out to a guesstimated total of feeding of about 1.5 plus people for a year if rationed properly. That’s when this grid down thing had first started six months ago. He had sold some, gave some away, ate a bunch and shared a few meals with the needy and now he was down to 6 months for two.

Thing is Sam considered he wasn’t the defunct free food warehouse or church pantry for the needy in the city that had been helping the folks living in the country before this disaster either. This was particularly true as in the case Sam now found themselves in, they had food on hand, and the neighbors knew it but not how much was there or he had actually left after doing some minimal help they didn’t have a clue. For some time now it had been a mantra of Sam saying “I ain’t selling anymore food, that’s it for selling or giving away anymore of it, now what? I said I don’t have anything. Please go away or more forcibly “You need to get off my property” etc. This kind of a bad day had been coming around way too much lately. That’s why Sam and Lori had gathered up what they had left in food stores and decided they needed to move on

Sam had anticipated this food demand for free or sale too less fortunate others he was now encountering after the disaster, well the best he could anyway. He didn’t really know about or anticipate the number of relatives they had or how the disaster affected some family men he now mentally worried about who he thought might be likely to be discussing robbing him with their wives.

Oh they were basically good folk living around here, he and they depended on one another for security and they were kind of sort of following his advice on getting a community crop in and doing some organized hunting and trapping, well for a bit anyway, that is until all that dissolved into nobody showing up for work except for the bugs and the wildlife to discourage them from further efforts.

Thing is it was more than worrisome about how they might now come to see Sam after he had cut them off cold after doing everything he felt he could to help them. Some might be thinking some very bad thoughts about him or were being evilly influenced by a group to make them more subordinate and see it their way. Could be some started thinking of Sam as not being as worthy of a character as he used to be to stand between them and their children’s hunger and his meager food stores he had refused to share based upon him just saying no with the implied threat of a holster on his hip.

Sam knew the primal and often violent urges men got to protect and provide for their families and he knew also of a mother’s love for her children would leave no option untried when it came to their offspring’s health and welfare. That included maybe even robbing Sam and Lori. He didn’t begrudge them that bad idea as much as he acted like, he had hoped he could talk some sense into them and remind them it was his doing that they had got by so far with sort of little mutual survival pacts, but things were just too bad now to expect honor and former moral respect to carry any weight. The community garden project was a flop.

No him and his girlfriend were probably just considered somehow a bit dispensable as the “ the old odd couple” that needed to be taken care of in some fashion and not so much worry about doing it in a benign way, so they themselves and families could have more to eat in their possibly malevolent imaginations. Law of the jungle and all that. People always want more; even if they have plenty already they often want yours too. Some are just greedier or think they are needier than others so taking for themselves is ok.” Sam mused distractedly.

“Nobody has plenty of anything except a belly full of misery nowadays I guess, that is unless you count them worthless son of a bitches in government that could have prevented this catastrophe if they had just listened to the public calls for action to harden and improve our infrastructure from known threats.” Sam groused to himself.

Hell, what were folks in government going to do with them mobs of Middle Eastern refugees they had brought in and forced on the states? Turn them and the illegal aliens and prisons out to do what they wanted to in the country side or have them waiting to move in with us at the FEMA camps to accost the good American citizens needing help? I bet that’s just what the SOB’s did was just walk away and leave the gates open while they hid in a bunker and ate well. Bad enough we already had our whole entitlement crowd with generations of gangs and ghettos destroying cities and minds but now we got the Jihadi’s running amok because their welfare checks stopped too.

Hopefully those animalistic bastards will die off fighting with each other over scraps of food but not for some time. Hell they are all probably organizing into new gangs and having a field day of rape and pillage without normal legal oversight now. The fools will have already been partying in the streets looting everything they can get their grubbies on if they were just the common run of the mill ignorant lopsided thinking opportunists stealing TV’s and Tennis shoes while our thin nation borders don’t even attempt to stop the cartels and lord knows what moving towards the land of opportunity to take over what they now have access to even more freely.

If the criminals were already getting across the border smuggled guns, drugs and people before this crap happened, I bet now they are all in second heaven doing more of it and wondering what to do next. Seems like they could get a load of whatever they wanted to across the border back then, I bet the cartels already got the black market food distribution business cornered. They can basically take over farms and have slave labor producing it in Mexico and shipping it up North until they get enough territory in the US taken over to do the same thing here and make the Peon financial system a common thing.

“The military, oh my word the military, what were they doing at the moment? Fighting with starving citizens or waiting on a invading country” Sam wondered as a twig snapped out in the woods and brought him to a instant halt as he froze and scanned in that direction for game or would a be aggressor.

“Far too easy for someone to just lay in wait in the bushes with a deer rifle waiting on him or his wife to go fetch water. Far too easy to overwhelm her at the house when he was out trapping or collecting water” Sam somberly considered. Far too easy to die these days for all kind of stupid reasons at any given moment and he wasn’t going to take it anymore! Nasty thoughts flooded his head of all he had seen and experienced the last several months.

Why it was just the other day that the couple that lived up the road from him had come down and told Sam that they would take care of those pesky neighbors of his for him if he gave them twenty five pounds of rice and some beans if he had any left for barter. It didn’t seem that they wanted to take care of them in any nice way either as evidently they had some previous angst or grudge against them by their demeanor.

In addition to the violence-prone, there will be the element of normally decent people who didn't prepare and who will try to take what they need by whatever means necessary to keep themselves and their families alive

That was when Sam had told Lori in no uncertain terms that it was time for them to be moving on away from this place.

Sam calmed himself down now as he decided it was probably just a bird browsing in the forest litter or something that he had heard to distract him and put him on guard as he went back to stealthily slinking back down the trail towards the creek. He was on a mission today to pick up all his body hold Conibear animal traps today and get himself ready for tomorrow to bug out. As he walked along he could just not get that disturbing conversation out of his mind about the alleged bounty of rice on his neighbors head.

After Arnold had so aggressively told him of his willingness to “expeditiously remove the problem and Sam didn’t have to worry about it” regarding the rice barter thing, Sam had to do some serious rethinking of his position in this life. He felt betrayed and worried that now that for the price of a few meals you could put a contract or bounty on someone. Seems all his good will efforts were for naught to try to get the community together and it was just a waiting game he figured until someone put a value on him.

He had tried to delay this moment of deciding on his bug out plans as long as he could and wait and see a more positive outcome based on his false trust of human nature, well with the people he was dealing with anyway. He had tried to have a contingency plan for them somewhat and had thrown an extra 10 bucks a week out of his own pocket that he couldn’t really afford in the last year preparing for when the starving neighbors with kids might come calling asking for a handout. He had bought rice and beans and such for them as hand outs to see if they would honor a pact with him and as a means to reinforce his leadership capabilities but that plan wasn’t working out, it was all take and nothing more it seemed.

These weren’t humble starving people used to doing without and grateful for any help he could give, no they were jealous and petty modern era folks used to getting instant gratification without hard work to obtain it or a great deal of patience persevering like his grandparents and parents did during the great depression.

Most of them yahoos were countrier than hell but that didn’t mean they knew nothing about how to farm or even tend a garden for that matter. They lived in the country, they did menial jobs like factory work or construction labor in the city and to even think of busting the ground up by hand with a mattock or hoe for a garden was somehow beneath them to do at home and too country living for them as they preferred to lord over their new smart phone acquisition to their somewhat jealous less financially enabled cousins and such who were poorer than they were living in a rundown trailer about 30 yrs old. That’s pretty much the survival talents they possessed during hard times every day.