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Competition

Submitted by An Outdoor Idiots Team Member.

Competition Results

After some bitter in-fighting which has led to actual torn skin and a missing shoe, we have finally decided upon the winners of our recent competition. Given that the nature of the prizes is such that the lives of the winners will change forever, it is not a matter we took lightly.

1st Prize

Multi Fuel Stove by John Watts.

Sometimes we get excited when we check our web statistics and find that one of our articles is linked to from another forum. Often we can't tell what has been linked to, and we can't find the thread that does the linking, because there is no ID to the particular thread, or the forum is not available to unregistered users. However, sometimes we can find the thread and sometimes the comments about the article aren't entirely negative, which makes us happy and helps us to justify our very existence.

Imagine our surprise when we found the above article linked to. Someone at BushcraftUK liked it enough to start a thread about it, and other people seemed to enjoy the article too. What higher praise could one possibly hope for? It certainly was one thing which helped this article win the top spot.

We also liked the nice balance of high-quality photos (the photos we received were even higher quality before we maliciously over-compressed them) and text.

As well as being humorous the article also contains some interesting ideas and may well inspire people to play with making a stove or to carve up innocent bits of wood in the misguided hope of being able to produce art.

Also of interest is that we received this submission before we started the competition. That's probably telling us something, but we haven't worked it out yet.

2nd Prize

Animal Behaviour (and My Essential Outdoor Gear) by John Watts.

At first we were horrified to discover that we were about to give first and second prizes to the same author. We could see ourselves becoming the subject of some sort of investigation into corruption.

Also, John has been declaring in our forums that he's out to win the competition, and has inundated us with a barrage of two whole entries since it began. We had a good mind not to let him win, just to stop him being so cocksure!

But there's no getting away from the fact we really like John's high quality photos and his engaging writing style. We like it so much that there was a real danger of him bagging all the prizes, so we have cheated him out of that by counting two of his submissions as one.

"Animal Behaviour" we particularly liked. It's a pointless and useless article and it makes us smile every time we read it. "My Essential Outdoor Gear" is also a good example of the type of submission we originally envisaged for this site, the idea being that if people blabbed on about what they carried around with them, it might give other people ideas. The minimalist Trangia set up in that article is certainly likely to do that.

3rd Prize

Pine Needle Tea by Mad Dave.

This for us was the most controversial winner, because there isn't much to it and because it is on a subject that has already been done to death on the Internet.

However, interestingly, if you search for "Pine Needle Tea" on Google, the first page of results link to articles that contain no photographs of it being made. Photographs really do help an article to be persuasive, and are more likely to result in somebody going out and having a go themselves.

We rejoice that this article might persuade the youf of today that there are better things to do with knives than to stick them into each other - something which they seem to be losing sight of.

Again, we liked the balance of photos and text with a bit of humour. Judging from Mad Dave's posts in our forums, it also came as quite a shock and a relief when we read his submission and realised that it was fit for publishing. We probably wouldn't have included the photo of the scary man at the end, though - if people want to see things like that, they can tune in to Crimewatch.

Honourable Mentions

There are certain other submissions which people have put a lot of effort in to and/or are informative/entertaining, and in the cold light of post-judgement-day-dawn it's really very hard to explain why they haven't won - we just wish we had an infinite number of prizes to give away.

We were going to mention just a few of them here, but we've changed our minds. Taken with a sudden fit of emotion, we felt that all of our user-submissions deserve honourable mentions. The fact that anyone would want to submit anything to our silly little web site is as flattering as it is hard to fathom. Which brings us on to...

The Competition Entrants

Using the magical powers of databases, here is a list of all the "user-submissions" that we published up to the end of the competition deadline. They appear in chronological order for each type. We treated all of them as entries in the competition, except where the authors were known to anyone at Outdoor Idiots.com:

Type: Article

Weekend Backpacking Gear
     By Adam James
My Attempt to Build a Natural Shelter - Best to Leaf it to the Experts?
     By Stephen Penson
The German Army Sleeping Bag
     By The Mysterious Mr. S
Outer Limits Hiker Fly Review
     By Jason Rice
Multi Fuel Stove
     By John Watts
Pine Needle Tea
     By Mad Dave
The Various Musings of Don Wing
     By Don Wing
Animal Behaviour
     By John Watts
John Watts' Essential Outdoor Gear
     By John Watts

Type: Photograph

Crocodile Rock
     By Stephen Penson
Mushrooms are NOT Magic
     By Stephen Penson
Moody Lake
     By Stephen Penson
Crocodile Rock. Again.
     By Anonymous
Icelandic Ice Nodules
     By Anonymous
Canoeing on Loch Goil
     By Matt Wetherill
Jobbie
     By Martin Conway
Pen y Fan
     By Jules Conner

Type: Top Tip

Compact Deodorant for Backpacking
     By Anonymous
Emergency Footwarmer
     By Stephen Penson
Batteries in Cold Weather
     By Anonymous
Using a Heater in a Tent
     By Anonymous

You can discuss the competition in our forums, here.

If you can't be bothered to enter the forums, then shame on you! But you can still leave a comment below. Please try to avoid the profane ramblings of a madman. That's our job.

Your Comments

On 17 July 2007, Gordon said:
I read that the strands inside para cord could be used as fishing line. I have tried it and it can. Could one of you now tell me how I get the cord back in as I have finished using it to fish with.

On 28 June 2007, Edward91 said:
Real nice! Your web site is helpful. Keep up the great work. Keep it up!

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