how to make an emergency boat

Emergency craft have a great appeal- who knows when one might need to escape from rising floodwaters now that Global Warming is in the climatic driving seat.

The simplest emergency boats are made from found objects: pallets with plastic drums strapped to their underside, a duvet stuffed with bubble wrap, old inner tubes.

More interesting is to make a craft from natural materials. Logs are the most obvious- but beware- some, such as heart oak, actually sink, and others barely support any weight at all.

Twelve logs of larch each 30 lbs in weight making a monstrously heavy 360lb raft will only support a single 12 stone man without sinking. Poplar is best (apart from super light woods like balsa)- a 200 lb raft will support 120lbs weight.

Reed rafts work much better- you can fashion a wooden frame and then bundle reeds beneath it to make it float. You can also inflate animal skins or, for the squeamish, plastic kit bags sealed tight with cord. These can be fastened under your raft frame.

Many travellers now carry inflatable thermorest mattresses. Four of these bound to a light wood frame will work as an inflatable to carry one man to freedom- say across a river swollen by seasonal rain. Chris Macandless, the subject of John  Krakaur’s excellent Into the Wild, died in the Alaskan wilderness because he dared not cross a river in flood. Through he successfully killed a moose he made no move to use its skin as the covering for an improvised boat or as a float. The technique requires sewing up the skin as air tightly as possibly around a stuffing of hay and thin branches. As inflated goatskins are commonly used as rafts on the Tigris it is by no means farfetched to suggest this might have saved him.

Bamboo, if you are in tropical climes, makes an excellent raft material. Each sub-section within a pole is a self contained floatation chamber. You can use slivers of bamboo cut from the poles to tie the raft together.

If you have no saw or axe then you must burn down trees. Two men can start twenty small fires and attend to them all in order to fell twenty trees. For obvious reasons this method of felling has its vocal opponents- but if they’re around then they can save you and you don’t need a raft.

Dugout canoes are common from Canada to Chile. They are easy to make, but take time. The best tool is an adze. Start a fire on land and transfer the glowing coals to the log. Surround the embers with wet mud to contain the spread of the fire. Now build up the fire. Every few hours shift it along and hack away at the charred wood. Time consuming but not unpleasant work.

If you find yourself in gourd or calabash country, the Congo for example, these may be used as floats for a raft. Take the largest dried gourds you can find, line them upon two long thin logs and then tie two logs more along the top. The gourds thus trapped you have a single long float. Make three of these, bind them together and you have a fine watercraft known locally as a makara.

If you can weave a basket shape large enough you can cover it with the flysheet of your tent and make an excellent coracle. Willow is best for weaving though any thin springy wood unseasoned will usually work.

Hide trays are used in both Peru and Tibet- take an oxhide and pinch up the corners, rather like pinching up the corners of a piece of paper to make a crude open box shape. Make holes at each corner top and use thongs to keep them together. Sticks can be wedged inside to give the ‘tray’ some solidity.