My Everyday Carry

submitted by Freq18Hz

Not a sexy looking pic, but this is the load out that saved my hide this weekend.  My brother and I were driving near the coast on a very twisty road, in a heavily wooded area.  It was very dark, with no star or moon light.  All of a sudden the headlights started to go dim, and by about the time we figured out what was happening, the car made a beeping noise and shut off.  We lost all power.  I just happened to have my Surefire E1B with me, which I quickly grabbed out of my pocket.  I stuck my arm out of the window and we used it’s extremely throwy beam as a replacement headlight.  We were able to spot a service road a few hundred feet in front of us.  We turned into it and coasted to a stop.  It was pitch black without the E1B.  Had I not had it with me, or perhaps a less throwy light, we might have run off and down 30ft into the gulley next to us, or been hit by other vehicle.  I used the T1A titan to look under the hood, and try to jump the car with our emergency battery charging unit.  We ended up waiting for about 4 hours for the tow truck.  Thankfully I had a couple of nice cigars with me, so we used the CountyComm peanut lighter to smoke them (not exactly surviving, but hey a couple cigs go a long way to keeping morale up in the cold and pitch black). We ended up having to go for a bit of a hike down the service road and up to higher ground in order to get cell service to call for help. The T1A worked perfectly for navigating while maintaining our night vision.  It gets a bad rap from some for being underpowered, but when its actually DARK dark, the T1A is more than enough light.  I was able to light up a hillside about 100 yards away with it.  Previous to this outing, I was considering replacing the E1B and Titan with something more multi purpose, like a Quark regular 123.  This incident has made me re-think Surefire, and the absolute genius of their simplicity and overall design in an emergency situation.  While I own other lights that may have overall better specs on paper, or are smaller…on this particular night I would not have wanted to have ANYTHING else besides the reliability and simple UI of the Surefire’s.  It was that dark.

On a side note:  I am considering ditching the Sebenza and the Leatherman Squirt, and replacing them with a Leatherman Juice S2, or perhaps ditching the Surefire’s for a Quark 123 regular. Overall I think I have too much redundancy here between the wallet and the keychain.

In photo: Bills Urban Wallet, Surefire E1B Backup, Surefire T1A Titan, Leatherman Squirt PS4, Fisher Bullet Space Pen, CRK Small Sebenza knife, countycomm peanut lighter, ITP EOS A3 R5 flashlight, SwissTech SwissKey, eGear Pico flashlight, Leatherman Style, keys, Gerber Shard, iPhone 4 (not shown). The shard stows inside the wallet. Click the pic to see what everything looks like stowed away.  It all fits nicely into my front pocket, save the keys.

Editor’s Note: It’s good to hear you’re safe and your EDC got you through that mess. It’s true, out in pitch darkness, a few lumens is plenty. I prefer really bright lights just because I live in a more urban environment which has lots of pollution to compete against. If you really wanted to minimize your carry, I say keep the Sebenza, ditch the Titan, ditch the eGear, ditch the Style, ditch the Utilikey and put the Squirt on the keychain. I honestly don’t think the Juice would be a good compromise, especially considering you’d be losing a dedicated folder (and a Sebenza at that!) Anyway, hope that helps and thanks for sharing~