Island Survival--How to survive on a desert island

hey this is Tom macro at wild survival skills calm for the next week I'm gonna be living in full survival on this island my friend Matt came with me from Mount Victory camp I'm going to show you every step we take in order to live off the land so that you'll know what to do if you ever got lost in a deserted island okay we're starting to move inland away from the beach to get away from the sand plies you camp out on the beach on islands like this a lot of times you get so many sand flies that your survival situation becomes miserable what we're doing is moving up in the end of the hills just a little bit we're more of the resources are and to where we're protected from the elements our number one priority net right now is in making our shelter we don't know when this weather system is going to move through and so we want to get ourselves covered so we can stay warm and dry ricotta score and as walking up towards our shelter location we stumble upon a bunch of almond trees so we're going to have a bunch of almond C it's going to give us all the fats and oils we need we can't forget that our priority right now is making our shelter and finding a good source of water before going uphill and making our shelter we need to make sure we have a good supply of water for now getting coconuts is our best path so got these coconuts I got collected from two different clusters you look at a coconut tree they come in bunches the three so the furthest down will be most mature which would be like these triangular ones furthest up will be the least mature smaller ones these are generally better for drinking and these are better for making oil and coconut milk with as we search for a shelter location we look for something high and dry with plenty of materials developer okay so we got all of our raw materials prepped for our shelter and the posts in the ground we've got these Y sticks that are going to support some cross pieces for a simple a-frame a great shelter for conditions like we're in sheds the rain keep the Sun off of you and to flex the wind so now that we have all of our materials ready to go which is the the more labor-intensive part the shelter should go up really quick we put our shelter together with a mix of local trees bamboo palm patching and vines for cordage all right so what we've done so far is we lay down the flooring got it up off the ground about six inches we're going to start to put the roof and the floorboards on now and one cool trick for the roof is that with bamboo what you can do is cut out half of it and it's going to bend on that point so what I can do is now Bend this nice and gently the bamboo most likely won't break and this becomes the a in the a-frame of your roof what we're going to do is put this right over top we'll latch them down on both sides the bamboo flooring you see is putting down is made by slit pounded and flattened bamboo well this was a lot of work it was extremely comfortable making it really worth it so we got the rafters for the a-frame up and we have this bamboo that we pounded and we've got it laid down for four boards on top of some other pieces of bamboo so it raises us up off the ground so that we're not to read into our concepts of the critters collection time of all the materials and preparation time of all the materials to experienced people probably took us four four plus hours erecting this thing probably only took us about 45 minutes thus far so the material prep is a most important part once you get that all done the shelter should come up pretty quickly all right now it's time to put our palm fronds on top of our shelter what we're gonna do is so that they're always angling down split these palm leaves and now in order to do that you don't even need a knife you can just grab the top and start to pull these pull and just kind of direct it where you want it to go and pull these things in half real quick and easy which you're left with is a really good shingling material with all leaves facing the right way we're going to take these now and tie them to the top of the shelter we don't want to waste time reverse wrapping a bunch of cordage so what we're going to do is just grab a piece of the same rod and just grab a little this extra stock and pull this off this is going to be really strong and flexible plenty enough to lash everything that you need onto your children the segment's obviously sped up the actual process took us about 45 minutes to tie on all the palm fronds this roof despite being primitive was extremely effective held off numerous rainstorms that would come and hit the island oK we've been working on our shelter all day long definitely pastime for drinking in a situation like this we need to stay hydrated right now our best source of water is the coconut well it is extremely easy to open a coconut with a machete I want to show you here how you do this primitively or if you just didn't have your machete around we had set up this little coconut opening station and this actually proved to be the best way to get the nut out of the husk of the coconut well in the beginning there was a learning curve to opening a coconut on a steak by the end of the week we had this process down to getting the husk off in about 30 seconds we were also able to save the husk and burn those on our fires because they act as a mosquito repellent probably the easiest way to get water out of a coconut once it's D husk is just look at it as if it has two eyes and a mouth you can easily take a small sharp stick and puncture right through the mouth there once you've punctured a hole in your coconut what you can do now you know drink it all out and then once you've drunk it all out you can look at your coconut and there's a line running right between the eyes if you take your coconut and then smack it right in the halfway point it's going to break right in half now I didn't have to do this to water yet so it might be a little messy there you go one sit on that line it will break right in half you've got two perfect halves of coconut one really important thing to note about coconuts for a water source in a survival situation is that the older coconuts the one closer to the base of the tree are going to have a lot more oils in it which is really good for adding oils to your system but if you're using it as your only source of water this is going to be too much of a diuretic to keep you going for water generally for long-term source you're going to be using the younger coconuts toward the top of the tree not the lower ones down these ones don't have the oils in them and they're pretty pure source of water all right walking along the ocean is definitely proved to be a great source of food for the first day right here we have this guy here is called the bleeding tooth near right and they are totally edible and actually really good we've been taking them just putting them upside down on the coals next to the fire and cooking them in their own show so I'm just looking for ones that are this big but there's just a ton of them out here so we can definitely fill ourselves on snails alone if we really felt like it definitely gonna need to look out for walking along to collecting snails is for these urchins the spines on these guys will stick right to your foot and definitely ruin your trip okay the method of fire-making I'm gonna be using tonight it's called a bamboo fire saw there's tons of bamboo around here and hopefully this stuff's dry enough but this is a method that indigenous people use in Southeast Asia a lot it's one of my favorites if you've got bamboo around it's just pretty nice method okay so that's another friction fire so basically just take speed and pressure like everything else yeah slowly warm it up cross the fingers once I feel threatened to grab I know it's getting warmer yeah go and see it snug tiny little coal-black in their system to life using coconut husk for the tinder and hopefully it's fine enough nope yeah my bamboo to hold it in place that'll burn my fingers huh add some sing cross because this coconuts not working T good go all right fire yeah it's gonna be a really nice night we got some snails to cook some almonds to row some coconut to roast you know in tons of other things too so so it's really when you get that first fire from here all we have to do is keep it going all right here we are at our shelter let's take a little nap try and feel alright right now we're just working on projects that's over here finishing off this basket so have to carry so much up the hill with my arms you getting tired of carrying coconuts you think with the baby I'd have to speak with strongest arms in the world but sometimes when you're not used to carrying ten coconuts at a time pretty it's a pretty basket you got going on there yeah well backpack going on yeah I think in the room here gorgeous finishing it off look Harry coconuts freaking ten nut basket right there we got their toe this is a Malaysian rat trap I'm hoping to catch some of the rats around here this stick goes down hooks onto here and the noose is on the front so animal goes in hits the trigger stick sets it off and catches the animal around the neck we pushed a lot of skills late into the night and woke up to a beautiful sunrise we decided that day that we wanted to really focus on fishing we found some deer bone in the bushes when making our shelter and we were able to sharpen that against Sam stone and make some fish beers once sharpened we were able to lock those bone spikes down some on hold and we were ready to go most of our days swimming around the reefs trying to spear fish there definitely was a huge learning curve that went into this we had to learn the personality of every fish certain fish were just too fast and too aware for us to get anywhere near other fish were slow and unaware but getting the primitive spheres to penetrate proved to be really difficult we're in a real survival situation we probably would have speared a lot more but certain things we just want to do that live fortunately for us we're able to target lionfish only a little bit slow and somewhat territorial but they're also invasive species coming in from Asia they do a lot of damage to the reef and we felt fully justified in taking them out okay as I edit this I'm realizing that if I show day by day it's going to take way too long what I want to do now is fire through some of the cooler skills that we worked on show you some of the successes that we had and some of the innovations that we came up with in order to deal with the environment of the islands in any survival situation cordage is a must you need to find a really good supply in the first couple of days fortunately for us we have snake grass on this island there's a ton of it around and we can use this and process it and make it into really strong for it that's going to help us tie our bone spikes under our fish Spears or make our baskets make our shelter and make traps alright this shelter is a coming together right now what I'm doing is taking a little break tonight I'm going to be working on a lot of traps and I want to make sure that I have enough cordage for that so I'm taking the snake grass scraping down the length of it I've got it attached to palm frond and getting all the fibers out of the stuff make extremely good cordage with our shelter we only needed to use vines my traps I want a really nice reverse-wrap pork I'm scraping the excess off this leaf revealing only the fibers and I can read that - a really great course as in any survival situation something fails in this case it was my camera unfortunately we lost some really cool footage one of them revolved around this fish trap this fish trap is made out of a single piece of bamboo split into spokes and then wrapped with tree vines we are able to stick it into the reef and bait it with crushed up snails wrapped in Coco burlap this kept the fish from being able to get in and eat all of the bait the double conical structure of the trap allowed the fish to get into the trap and not allow it to get out this ended up catching a great carrot fish that you'll see later there okay guess you missed it what I was describing in there is that we couldn't get deep enough to get the Cong out of the ocean there about 50 we developed this raft to haul a basket full of rocks out and we actually use that to elevator s down to the bottom of the ocean this way we didn't have to expend any energy we just hung on to the bag and we're down in a few seconds all right I'm getting to this a little late but I just came back to my trap and it actually looks like I got a mugger um his Mongoose all over this island I'm getting to this a little late but uh long just went in went for the bait and trigger set you can see the triggers now up here Mongoose is right down here and get a little lady still good though be able to skin that and eat that tonight not a huge amount of meat on these things but should do for a little bit of a meal definitely supplement our protein and our plant diet right now so that'll be great alright here we are back to camp this is one of the content we got I just want to show you how to get these things out because they actually suction themselves in here really really tight and the first thing you need to do is break that suction so what you're going to do is about three rings up you're going to put a hole and so you can just take your machete or you know any Shrock or anything like that and basically by putting a hole in here you're breaking this option you can hear it kind of releases from there you're going to take a stick and you're gonna grab the claw at the same point I'm going to kind of just put in stick kind of work it around and pull the conch out as hard as you can by breaking the suction you keep it from stop its ability to really pull itself into a shell as hard as it normally can which is pretty hard alright once you fight with the con can get it out of it's shell this is basically what it looks like this guy was really fighting to stay in there from here I'm just going to trim out anything that doesn't look like meat and then I can pound the rest of it just really pound it or else it stays really tough and then once you pounded it could fry it up I think we're going to steam pit cook this one in some bamboo today was a great day successful dive for some conch ya talk wrapped up here in some papaya leaf which is a natural meat tenderizer which is good because this conch is gonna be tough got this uh piece of bamboo cut we're gonna steam it in there got some water with some coconut in there not exactly coconut milk but stuff it is the plug the top it's going to hold the steam in there and it's going to go right on the coals for a long time I never thought you could actually cook bamboo straight on the fire but as long as it has water in it it doesn't burn and it's a great cooking vessel all right here we go bamboo cut this thing is boiling heavily I'm sure the Kong's good bye now pull it off the fire dump it right into a survival bowl here - piece of bamboo add some chopped in half all right we got our conch fully cooked with a little coconut milk see how it is to proud oh my god super tender really really good that's the best I've ever hi damn that's good all right thank you sweet damn weed all that we have to help a lot of food for just going out the bottom the ocean just grabbing something doing this stabbing to do just keep that sucker out all right here we have our knee rights cooking on the fire we have a ton of these but they cook really quickly so we're only going to cook lemon shifts but these are going to be a great protein snack they taste amazing okay you can see our knee right here bubbling and that means that it's fully cooked the little flaps open so we're going to yank him out line them up the rest and we've got our escargot first course alright so I'm gonna pick this door open on this knee right and see the snails attached to the door so you just carefully pull around and they may not look too good they taste pretty damn good so the parrot fish is a score from the fish trap Harry I'm wrapping it in some coconut leaves to secure it and to prepare it for the clay bag alright we got a huge score today the parrot fish and we started we're going to clay bake it even though we could just wrap it and throw on the fire like we did the other one but um we've got is a nice set of clay underneath it like a pancake of clay on some coconut leaves I'm going to take this top piece flip it over on top it's going to seal it inside make sure that Clay's not touching so it seals it inside that clay now what I can do is basically just pinch the edges in and seal this off so that it's completely locked in airtight okay so I flip the top pancake over on top of the fish and now I'm just going to seal off all the edges and the fish is going to be in there it's going to be airtight and it's just going to bake in its own juices almost basically steaming itself I put this under here just for support and that can go right on to the coals okay sits out there for about an hour can't really overdo it too much in a clay bake and we'll crack it open like a rock peel that akka will have a great fish inside ready yep alright here we go was our big meal got a clay baked fish and see there's a huge play pancake ain't that off of there how to do a quick their batteries are dying on the last remaining batteries for our trip and cactus open normally a little more gently than this okay we've got this totally steam cook fish in there is imperative right there for right there hey well cook a little too well good but oh look at that clay baking can't go wrong look at the meat on that looks amazing it oh it's so good especially right now here we go again nice fish really grateful for that fish all the fish we've had this room this is fantastic here the different tastes a little lighter they're both amazing though you spending a week in the survival situation on an island like this it's absolutely parents and I are putting together a class we take students into a full survival situation where we work on all the skills that you've seen in this video please check out my survival skill stuff you

Channel: Tom McElroy-Wild Survival

Views: 3,159,516

Rating: 4.7579827 out of 5

Keywords: island survival, desert island survival, spearfishing, primitive skills, how to survive, Survival Skills (TV Genre), lion fish, naked and afraid, Discovery Channel (TV Network), National Geographic Channel (TV Station), history channel, Bear Grylls (TV Program Creator), Survivorman (TV Program), primitive technology

Id: QKs-kTaKv2o

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Wagnasty90]

Naked and afraid is awesome. I didn't know there was a rained out episode. What happened?

[u/yopeee]

This video bothers me... There are so much in this video that can mislead people into bad habits.

1. He never showed another water supply other than the coconuts which cause dehydration through diareah. If you are on the island long enough.. The coconuts will run out especially on a small island.

2. Lionfish are extremely venomous. If handled or cooked incorrectly, you can become very ill or possibly die. He never shows how to do this.

3. NEVER SINK 50FT INTO OCEAN WATER WITH OUT KNOW ING HOW TO DECOMPRESS OXYGEN CORRECTLY! He doesn't emphasize the dangers of this one bit.

4. Wasting time to build an elaborate shelter wastes time, daylight and energy when you first arrive. A basic shelter should suffice until you are comfortable in supplies to add comfort.

5. Being on an island, he should show you the differences in how to make different smoke colors for smoke signals. Fuck! He should show smoke signals period.

6. He showed a good way to start a fired but didn't explain it one bit...

This is nothing more than a novelty video and a really cool experience for these guys. Not a practical video on basic survival skills.

[u/Kleeb]

I'm allergic to almonds, coconut, and a lot of seafood. I'm basically fucked.

[u/gamer_6]

How to die miserably on a desert(ed) island -

1. Find some bitter almonds and eat them.

2. Climb a huge palm tree, like you've done zero times before.

3. Drink lots of coconut milk. It contains a lot of water that you'll need to replace all the water you're going to lose.

4. Build a shelter using the tools you remembered to bring with you.

5. Build a fire right next to your newly built, highly flammable shelter.

6. Wander around at night with a pocket flashlight.

7. Remember those basket weaving and trap making skills you learned in high school? Neither do I.

8. Stare into the sunrise and think about how little time you have left.

9. Go spear fishing in the nice, calm water that probably doesn't exist on your island.

10. Make rope using the snake grass that doesn't grow on your island.

11. Fill a basket with rocks and let it drag you down to the bottom of the ocean.

12. Undercook all your food over a campfire.

13. Somehow get off the island without lighting signal fires or using mirrors to flag down ships.

[u/mynameisdads]

He's no Uncle Ray.