I love making and having my bags available and those for my family too. Simple fact is though if you don't practice skills needed to survive, it's most likely that nerves will be your undoing. Without training there's a good chance that you WON'T do the right thing at the right time. I practiced for years going out for 3 nights or more at a time with nothing but a knife or simple bag setup and practiced skills. My magnesium firestarter skill saved me on 2 different occasions, because I'd practiced making fires with it repeatedly. When I fell through an iced over river, I went to a nearby Evergreen thicket, stripped out of my soggy clothes, started a fire where I could sit on some open pine needles and hung my clothes on the windward side of the fire to act as a wind break and to dry. 1 hour later, I was back hunting. The guy I was with was incredulous that I could pull out the stops so easily and do what was needed. I told him, "Just practice". I also practice making improvised weapons, including self bows, atl-atl, arrows and a variety of utensils, instead of purchasing said items for the same reason. It all looks easy on videos with someone else doing it or reading about it, but practice will pull you through when it's difficult or different than you'd imagined.
Practicing with a friend or companion is an even better thing to do also, than practice alone. Often your buddy will see errors you make or can perhaps help you hone a skill which you will miss going solo. My best friend growing-up often would put forth little contests. I'm not a very competitive person like he was, but I usually went along with it, and usually won them, but it did make for some interesting twists in my plans. Once on a survival training trip he said, "Let's see who can make the best bow & arrow in 1 hour and meet back here to show it to the other." I was game and we proceeded to make them out of sight of each other using only what we had with us. I cut down a 1.25" dia. maple sapling and used a piece of para cord from my survival kit in my cargo pocket to make a string, and it ended up having about a 50 pound draw weight. I found some tree suckers which were pretty straight and had saved feathers from several crows we'd killed in my other cargo pocket to use for fletching. I pulled apart some of the para cord to wrap the feathers onto the shafts and found some pine pitch to rub on the windings to keep them together better. In that amount of time, I didn't have a lot of ideas for tips, so I just split the shafts slightly and put a blowgun dart tip from my kit into each shaft and wound more cord center around them, thus making it into kind of a small game type point. We met up at the rendevouz point after the hour and his bow consisted of about a 2' long x 1/2" diameter branch bent over with some cotton cord for string and a draw weight of about 4 pounds. His arrows were almost as large in diameter as his bow and would fly approximately 2 foot and had just sharpened wood points.
I ended up tying a zebco fishing reel to the side of mine to act as an arrow rest that you could push the button and shoot and bring back your arrow for fishing or close bird hunting. I ended up feeding us that night too.
Unfortunately for him, he was out performed due to the fact he'd never practiced such a skill before that and his choices were based upon pure ignorance of what was required. I tell the story not to put him down or me up, but simply to show the difference practice can make in an outcome when you are stressed, be it reality stress or improvised stress for practice.
