Damp camp

The March long weekend brings our Scout district’s annual competition camp—the Fitzgerald Cup, which has been running for 82 years—where patrols (4-7 kids) demonstrate their camping skills. Most of our troop attended, organised into two patrols of 7 kids (making the biggest contingent at the event, which is why there were two very full trailers going there and back).

In previous years we’ve had the occasional shower, but usually it has been quite warm and dry. This year, however, was a marked contrast, as evidenced by the depressingly large collection of wet tents and ropes now spread across the Scout hall in the—probably vain—hope that they will dry by tomorrow night (they have to be packed away in readiness for Cubs on Wednesday). On Saturday we had three very intense downpours complete with thunderstorms that turned the roads into creeks, there was more thunder and rain on Sunday, and today, after a lovely morning in which the tents nearly dried, it rained again just as we were about to start packing up. Murphy’s law! The one good thing was that we didn’t cop the hail, winds and serious flash flooding that hit Melbourne on Saturday. These were so severe that they caused millions of dollars of damage and prompted a number of urgent voicemail and text messages from concerned parents on Saturday evening!

I was able to reassure the parents that their little darlings were doing fine. There was a temporary problem when one tent experienced a small invading river, but repositioning the groundsheet solved this. Indeed, the Scouts coped really well, despite the frustration, inconvenience, and downright discomfort at times. They still managed to cook and clean up for themselves (this competition tests their capacity to camp independently), look after most of their gear (okay, the odd item or two went astray, as usual), build some constructions (not necessarily the most stable objects I have ever seen, although the Kaos Patrol managed to win the gateway competition with their portcullis), and socialise (a little too frequently at times, but it was good for them to mix with each other and the other Scouts from the area). We even had a campfire. Well, sort of. We had the songs, skits and silly jokes that are the main ingredients of a campfire, but the actual conflagration was sadly absent: if it had actually been dry enough to get something to burn we wouldn’t have been allowed to have it because it is still fire permit season!

And at the end of the day, the Control Patrol won the Fitzy Cup, much to the delight (and perhaps surprise) of their Patrol Leader, the patrol members … and me. They were a very diverse group with a wide range of experience, but they managed to get their teamwork happening, and kept improving their efforts as the camp progressed.

As suggested above, the kids look after themselves on this camp, although I join them for lunch and breakfast, and give the occasional little reminder about things that it might be useful to do. I had hoped that I would have time to do some work, but I only managed to review a single paper, sitting in my car while it was raining. In fact, I still had plenty of responibilities on camp, taking a screenprinting activity for one of the bases, doing a round of assessing, and running the campfire.

So, I still have a whole pile of reviews to do, a whole pile of other work-related things to catch up on, and that depressingly large whole pile of damp objects strewn around the Scout hall (oh, yes, and there was a small flood in the Scout hall itself from Saturday’s meteorological chaos … which I decided to ignore until tomorrow night in the hope that it dries out too).