The Weekend Hiking towards the Expedition Challenge Award.
(article by Ivor)
We got away fairly much on time – well ten minutes later than scheduled. The first objective was to get to Lees Wood camp site where Ash would leave his car and then everybody would go in the minibus from there to the start point for the younger team. This was just before Latimer Village. Ash was to shadow this team while Ivor was to shadow the older team starting from Heronsgate. The weather forecast was excellent for hiking and actually behaved itself. So Ash and the 5 boys were left at their start point and Ivor took the other 4 to the footpath at Heronsgate. This happened to be in the narrow section of road approaching Heronsgate from the M25 roundabout at junction 17, which made things very awkward. Ivor then proceeded to the car park next to the church at Chorleywood Common and waited for the 4 scouts to appear. What was estimated as three quarters of an hour turned into twice that time but the boys arrived at the bus at 13.00 and had their lunch.
The rest of the walk was fairly uneventful and the team arrived at Lees Wood at 5pm to discover that the younger boys had been there over an hour. The younger team had also erected their tent and cooked their meal on the new Coleman lightweight cookers. The older team proceeded to do this and most of their work was out of the way by 7pm. On site were the Harrow Radio Society who had set up their sets for the Jamboree on Air and who were making contact with scouts all over the world.
Next day the boys were up bright and early and at 7.30am were heard playing in the woods! If only they had put their effort into getting breakfast and packing away, we might have departed by 10am and not 11am. The Sunday hike was to be a straight forward walk through Whippendale Woods in a circular manner, going down to the Canal. It was changed to a direct route and as a result the walk finished by 1.30pm. The minibus had earlier been taken to the end point next to Croxley Green underground station and everybody climbed aboard exhausted ready for the journey back to camp, for Ash’s car, and then back to St Peters.
Cooking Evening
(article by Ivor - thanks!)
The objective this evening was to produce a quick meal in camp cooking style.
It was suggested that the patrols all be given some chicken breast and a cook in sauce to be served upon a bed of rice.
To make things even easier the scouts were given boil in a bag rice and the sauce was a sachet that just need to be poured over the cooked chicken and heated.
Simple yes? No! two patrols did not read the cooking instructions for the rice and opened the bags pouring the rice into a billie of water.
However this was not too big a distraction and the boys had cooked and eaten within three quarters of an hour. The 4 boys not taking part in the District Pathfinder weekend were then left with all the washing up.
The others were split into their two teams for the weekend. This tended to be a team of four13 year olds and then a team of five younger boys but we swapped one of the older boys into the younger team.
Ash had pulled out the tents and purchased the new Coleman lightweight cookers. He had also been to Waitrose with a member of each team on the previous Wednesday evening and purchased as much lightweight food as possible.
This evening the team members shared this equipment and billies out, and packed it into their rucksacks which they had brought along fully packed in accordance with their instructions the previous Friday.
They had also returned the maps and finished route plans so that all could be put into the bus that night and then they just had to appear next day with their packed lunch.
Various changes had to be made to the rucksacks as they were either too small or the waist belt was too large for their small waists. One rucksack (or was it a large day sack?) had not waist belt at all which meant the scout would have taken everything on his shoulders.
However all was achieved within the evening and the boys departed looking forward to the next day (especially when I showed them the giant water balloon catapult)
A short break from blogging…
Because of leave, plus a few other things, I won’t be blogging for a few weeks – if you can deal with that… I (and my colleagues) will be writing up the evenings, but it may not get uploaded until the end of the month. See you soon!
Pioneering Challenge
I had to change the main contents of this evening as we have the Pathfinder weekend coming up and wanted to give the Scouts some compass practice.
So the evening started with a game of “Poison Tree” – and it must have been a long time since we played it last as I had to explain ALL the rules, not just recap for new people. That went well, although the scouts seemed to prefer going round the tree rather than dragging their colleagues through the pile of tyres…
We moved onto the main part of the evening. We stuck Ordnance Symbols round the hall. Each Patrol then decided (within the Patrol) which ten symbols they would use, then from their patrol corner worked out the bearing to the symbol. For good measure they wrote down the bearing and the symbol. All patrols moved clockwise round the hall. The “new” patrol would then take a new sheet of paper (which only had the bearings on them) and worked out what symbol the bearing pointed to and what the symbol meant. Unfortunately, because of the size of the hall, and because I don’t think the Scouts grasped the concept of bearings at the start, the bearings to the symbols weren’t particularly accurate. However, the evening showed that the idea for the learning was reasonably sound, so we may come back to that again (with a few minor tweaks).
The Scouts then split up into those going on the Pathfinder weekend (who then started on their route cards) and those not – who were challenged to build a pioneering structure to get over an electrified line without touching it. I was working with the latter group – and whilst they got what they needed to do - and I could see that the idea they were working on was sound – their team and planning skills still needed some work… but hey, that’s what Scouting’s about.
I also got back my first family history tree from Joshua – well done! In telling me how the family had got together, it was clear that he had learned something more about his family than just who his grandparents were – which is excellent.
Night Hike
Well, it was warmer than I thought it would be… but still one or two Scouts managed to turn up improperly dressed (IT’S AUTUMN GUYS, IT’LL GET COLD AT NIGHTS!!!!). We set off towards Bentley Priory to do the smaller circular walk. It was a reasonable turn out and we set out from Stanmore Common.
Heading up into the woods we walked past the Deer Park – given the noise the Scouts were making I doubted seeing anything – so imagine my surprise when the first torch beam landed on a Deer! Rather than run away (probably blinded by the lights) the deer just stood there as more lights were directed towards him, before slowly moving off.
We carried on up to Bentley Priory itself, the high fencing still looking impressive, and we carried on through.
The Scouts had a bit of a challenge with their navigation – partly due to it being dark, and partly because they were focusing on talking to each other and not looking for signposts! But hey, it was a night out. Consequently, we did end up following some quite odd footpaths (which may not have been) to get back to proper footpaths (and the bus). It also took us quite a while to walk the shorter of the two circular walks – so I’m glad we did take the shorter option!
