Forest Lakes Camp 2020

Here we come, walking down the street... 

The sentiment shared by everyone on camp this weekend. 

There were several highs this weekend.

• The first for the leaders was the show of competence displayed by the scouts when putting up the big tents. Leader supervision of this activity (and subsequently putting them away at the end of the camp) was really at a minimum and a real moment of pride for us leaders

• The "stick with it attitude" that was visible in everything they tried and did, even though some of the exercises had obviously been completed by some of the scouts on the previous camp

SATURDAY

We changed up the order of doing things for this camp so that Saturday morning was all about "The Quest".  5 exercises set to challenge scout thinking and team work.  Problem solving to the max.

• The Drum Cram - get all scouts in the group to balance on a 44 gallon drum on it's side.  Not as well as last year (8 scouts on the drum for 60 seconds), but one group managed 6 scouts for 13 seconds.

• The Spiders web - get all the scouts in a group through a spiders web of string without touching the string and not using the same hole more than once.  Both groups managed this one reasonably easily but both took a fair amount of time to practice and prepare.

• Next up was the Holy Drum.  Each of the two groups took a turn to attempt to fill up the drums as much as possible in 10 minutes.  A lot of fun watching the water go everywhere over the drums and the poor scouts trying to block the holes in the drums.
• The last two exercises were done together and then swapped.  The Tension wire, suspended over a river is always good fun.  Scouts have to cross the river holding onto a rope suspended from a tree over one side of the river.  Although more fun than the exercise itself was using the rope as a "Tarzan swing" afterwards apparently.

• The other was the Log Roll.  The challenge being to get the whole group onto the log suspended over the river and then get them to reverse their order without falling off, pushing other scouts off or in any way getting wet!  Definitely not easy.

Saturday afternoon was spent erecting tents and building their food preparation areas.  While the tents were put up to a high standard, the same could not be said of the lashing and pole constructions that were supposed to serve as their food prep areas.  Some were good, some were reasonable and there were others as well!

Hamish later showing us how useful the homemade kitchen is	Quinn showing how to use a water bottle as a spirit level

Campfire on Saturday night was a hit.  Lots of good skits, many of them traditional scout campfire skits as well.  One in particular stood out as a new one on some leaders who found it hilarious: "The invisible bench".  Fantastic participation for this.

SUNDAY

Sunday started slowly with a lie in til about 7:30 am. Not that the scouts didn't stop talking among themselves from much earlier. 

Breakfast was a reheating of dinner, Forest Lakes Pasta Surprise. Delicious. After Breakfast we started on the big challenge - making Coracles! 

Ciara and her watch were consistently picked out by Warren (our host) as doing a superb job and the coracle lived up to expectations carrying 3 of her team dry out into the lake and back, while the fourth made it, they did not stay dry. Other teams met with varying levels of success.

Once the frames were built, they were covered over in a tarpaulin and raced out to a canoe and back again.

The scouts behaved brilliantly even helping with the unloading when we arrived back at the den.  All the packing up was achieved amongst much mirth, but packed up it was and when we left, Warren complemented us on how tidy we had kept the place.

A HUGE thank you is worth acknowledging to Warren for hosting us, allowing us to use his challenge equipment and for leading the last one, the coracle building for the scouts.  

Heres to the next camp - Mid Winter!