Unseasonable summer camp

Tasmania’s weather is notoriously variable, but having a full week of drizzle, wind, and coolth in the middle of summer is definitely unseasonable. And to have such a week coinciding with our annual Scout troop summer camp had the potential to be disappointing but we managed to have a good time despite it.

It was cool all weekend, with light showers at times, but it was tolerable enough to get out and about. On Friday afternoon we explored a little of the nearby coast, watching the waves pounding in thanks to the south-easterly weather system, and finding a geocache at the ruins of some saltworks.

Later we built a trebuchet/ballista-thingy and lobbed tennis balls into the disappointingly close “far distance” (the challenge is to get the swing arm moving with enough velocity). In the evening we got to do a little go kart driving around the paddock (that’s not me in the photo, but I had a nice lead-footed run which might just have challenged the best time if we had been clocking speeds) before a few games of spotlight/night time hide and seek once the late summer light had darkened enough.

On Saturday, after a slightly slow start, we got our little flotilla on the water — La Perouse (one of our patrol boats, set up for rowing because the conditions weren’t good for sailing), Bob (the little dinghy), and five kayaks — and attempted to head up the river. This turned out to be a rather ambitious idea. The outgoing tide and river current, together with a head wind made the going rather difficult. La Perouse, with several rowers, made moderate progress; Bob didn’t do too badly, but three of the five kayaks tended to catch the wind and the kids struggled a bit.

With one of the kayakers making little leeway, I ended up attaching a line and towing him, until, nearly an hour after setting off and having travelled all of 1km at the most, we arrived at two little islets where we stopped for a snack (some sections of that 1km were travelled several times, as we drifted backwards at a fair clip any time we stopped paddling!).

The return journey, in sharp contrast, took about 7 minutes, with the tide, wind and current at our backs.

After lunch back at our campsite, we decided to head out for another walk further northwards up the coast. After being merely overcast in the morning the sky picked this moment to start drizzling, a thing it stopped doing once we got back to camp!

In the evening we cooked our dinner over hot coals (including cake cooked in oranges) and the kids did some badgework, before finishing the evening with another couple of rounds of spotlight.