A little about me bushcrafter, climber, developer, dad...
I have always had a passion for wild places and spending time in them. Bushcraft for me is a way of being comfortable and feeling at home in wild places.
As a child the subject for me and my friends came under the heading of 'survival' and books by the likes of Lofty Wiseman and Eddie McGee were high on my Christmas list.
However, survival implied a sense of 'how to get out of this alive', whereas I was in search of 'how can I stay here longer?' When Ray Mears appeared on TV in the early 90's and brought the term bushcraft to my attention, that became my subject of study.
Woodsmoke - June 2003
In 2003 I attended a week long bushcraft course called the Woodlander which was run by Woodsmoke in the Lake District, the course was excellent and I'm happy to say I received a distinction.
My learning accelerated from attending the course and later that year took a place on their Abo' course. Over the next few years I consolidated my learning with time spent in remote areas of England and Scotland as well as The Bahamas practicing the skills I had learned.
In 2007 and 2008 I assisted the Woodsmoke team on many of their courses, further learning from a different perspective. I have also worked with other UK bushcraft schools including Bushtruck and Dryad Bushcraft.
I only spend a few days each week making knives as the majority of my time these days is dedicated to my twin girls. I am a keen climber and can be often found training at Rokt , my local climbing gym.
I also have a passion for web development which originally came from a need to build a website for Bushblade Knives, which you can learn more about here. For those geeky enough to want to know - this site is built with GatsbyJS, ReactJS and styled-components mainly using VS Code Neovim on a desktop installation of Manjaro Linux with continuous deployment to Netlify through GitHub.