The framework · Built since 2014
Five phases. One framework. The structure I wish I'd had thirty years ago.
F.A.P.L.E. is what I built for myself when more books, more videos, and more gear stopped fixing the problem. It's not a course. It's a way of organising hunting so the brain can run it under pressure — with structure converted to skill, and skill converted to autopilot.
The story
Thirty years of hunting on three continents, a couple of instructor certifications, two decades of process work in tech, and I still walked into the field feeling clumsy when it mattered. The same mistakes kept turning up. Different terrain, same mistakes.
I kept blaming gear. Or knowledge. So I bought more, read more, watched more. Friction stayed.
The honest answer was harder. The problem wasn't that I was missing information. The problem was that none of what I knew was organised in a way my brain could actually run when the buck stepped out and the clock started.
F.A.P.L.E. came out of that. It's the structure I built to stop being the bottleneck in my own hunts.
The mistakes
None of these are unique to me. If you've hunted seriously for a while, at least three of these will sting. They did for me.
The gear trap. Researching a new rifle, scope, or cartridge with the certainty it will close the gap. The gap is never gear.
More books, more YouTube, more courses — with no model that tells you which idea matters when. Knowledge without structure is just trivia.
Practising the shot, not the build-up to it. Practising the technique, not the transition. The bit you can't do under pressure is almost always the bit you didn't rehearse.
Lists are clean. Reality is wet, dark, and on a slope. Plans that have never met terrain are not plans yet.
Without a framework, every mistake feels like character. With one, every mistake has a phase and a diagnosis. The first wears you down. The second gets better.
The mindset
Hunting is a complex skill running on a brain that can only hold four things at once. Structure is how the other forty fit.
The shift is small but it matters. F.A.P.L.E. is not a more elaborate to-do list. It's a way of moving most of the hunt off conscious thought and onto autopilot — so your working memory is free for the things only a human in the field can decide.
The method
Each phase has its own page with the questions, the sub-models, and the mistakes it's designed to prevent. The order is not arbitrary — each phase feeds the next, and the loop closes back on Fundamentals after every hunt.
The five-step hunting process. Find, Reach, Set Up, Shoot, Follow Up. The skills the rest of the framework expects you to own.
5 processes · RaPTor STrAFeRR · ASBI
Questions 1–5. Situation, Strategy, Tactics, Tools, Techniques. The thinking layer that fits the fundamentals to a specific hunt.
Q1 — Q5
Questions 6–8. Clothing system, carry system, transitions. The work you do before the season so the season works.
Q6 — Q8 · CAMPER · RGB
Question 9. Trip admin and outdoorsmanship loadouts. The unglamorous half of a hunt that quietly decides whether the rest of it works.
Q9 · Loadouts
Question 10. Prepare, Insert, Hunt, Extract, Process. The rhythm of the actual trip — from leaving home to butchering at the kitchen table.
Q10 · PIHEP
The behaviour
I'm not going to tell you to adopt F.A.P.L.E. The whole posture of this site is that I built this for me, and if any of it is useful to you, take it — rename it, fork it, replace it.
The behaviour that actually matters is this:
Before the next hunt, ask yourself which phase you're weakest in — and put the work there. Not in the gear list.
That single behaviour is what F.A.P.L.E. is for. Everything else — the questions, the sub-models, the acronyms — is scaffolding to make that question easy to answer honestly.
Practice
E3 Hunter App
The brand site is where I think. The app is where I work. Gear inventory, loadouts, hunt planning, shot-pattern analysis — each one mapped to a F.A.P.L.E. phase. Still being built, in the open.
→Field Notebook
Each blog entry is filed under a F.A.P.L.E. phase. Read by phase to see how the model meets the field — usually messily — in practice.
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