Practice some. This happened a month or 6 weeks back. I can finally grin about so I shall share.
Went off for a weekend a month or so ago. No sweat, 25' camper, full hookup place and all.
One evening my wife wanted me to build a camp fire. No sweat, had ring, wood, kindling, tinder. Lighter, charcoal fluid and all that also. I figured I would see how well and easy the straw tubes of vaseline cotton would work. Set up fire cone, split straw, fluffed cotton, got it in place and started scraping the spark stick. Scraped and scraped and on and on. After the first 5 minutes I got the new stick cleaned so it sparked well. Fluffed cotton and scraped. A good 10 minutes later she got to asking if I needed a match. I got my cotton out of the way and used the lighter. She had a bit of a grin on her face and I felt mighty dumb.
Another couple minutes and more fluffing and I had a nice cotton ball fire going. And learned that practicing is generally a good thing to do. No matter how good you are at doing it.
Nemo
