Working with some specialist climbing equipment from Equal Adventure

Jay preparing a piece of Elder for his whistle

The finished articles

It was a really constructive day today at the Institute of Outdoor Learning's South-west conference. I attended three very good workshops. The first was a session on climbing for people with disabilities. We were able to get to grips with a bag of specialist equipment supplied by the guys at Equal Adventure.

The second workshop was all about updates in health and safety and the move from AALS to Adventuremark, a very worthwhile session delivered by Pat Dollard from Kernow Training.

For the third workshop I decided to attend the "safe use of knives and saws" workshop. This was a really enjoyable session delivered by Richard Irvine. The workshop gave me some new bushcraft ideas and some useful tools to add to the tool bag. We spent the session making whistles from Elder, wooden butter knives from Hazel and learning how to effectively cleave using a bill hook.

Overall a really successful day, thanks to all the guys at IOL SW for all their hard work.