Defending the Scout hall

A week of extremely wintry weather led to reconsidering our plans for a weekend Scout camp. Instead we “camped” in the hall for Friday night only, and hoped that Saturday would be enough to try and accomplish the time-critical things that we’d planned. We had a few games and did some knotting basics on Friday night, before setting up the tents inside, which had the double advantage of being warmer (Scout halls are notorious for being very cold in winter) and settling the kids more quickly (the open space of a hall tends to compound the usual bedtime delaying tactics). On Saturday, after everyone had slept in until 8am (the sleeping-in-tents strategy might have been too effective!), we got stuck into doing some construction to help the Scouts achieve some significant badgework.

The younger kids did a series of smaller items, including simple but fun chariots, which were raced until they disintegrated (the younger kids don’t always have the strength to get really firm lashings to hold things together).

The older Scouts built a bridge, to their own design and with minimal supervision, which took them a bit longer than they’d hoped (not least because our rope supply is a bit inadequate and so they had to stop and whip the ends of some new lashing ropes so they could finish the job). This didn’t photograph well and wasn’t quite as spectacular as it might have been in a more bridge-worthy location (it’s a bit lame to build it over a ditch, but that’s all we had), but I can comment that it was simultaneously over-engineered (it took us ages to retrieve the anchoring pickets which had been pounded in to the Mohorovi?i? discontinuity) and under-engineered (some of the lashings and guy ropes were probably not as OHS-compliant as you might have wanted in a more serious location).

Their more satisfying project was a catapult, which had the double bonus of moveable parts and the prospect of raining (relatively) harmless projectiles on all and sundry. Although it worked quite satisfactorily there are one or two design improvements that might be made in future versions, including a longer launching arm to get an increased range. The kids had a jelly fight for a bit of fun, and one of the catapult builders persuaded them to line up in front of the catapult for a photo after the fight was over … and successfully launched the last remaining blobs of jelly into their midst.

And they finished the day by cooking dinner on the fire drums, including dessert in the camp ovens, and even marshmallows to finish off. Not quite the same as a full out-door camp, but a successful weekend under the circumstances.