Scout Meeting 12th March

It was a night of campfires and cooking. The Beaver meeting before ours had a campfire out in the yard where they sang songs and told spooky stories. Brendan and Alan arrived up early to get a fire going for the scouts and to blow up balloons, but more on that later.

We started off the meeting by reminding the scouts that must wear their Neckerchief to all meetings as some of them seem to have forgotten. Our ER game was imaginatively call the Corner Defence Balloon Bashing Game. We used the benches to split the room into 4 quadrants with a patrol in each and the leaders in the other. We threw in a load of balloons and the idea was to have as few balloons as possible in your area when the whistle blew. Any burst balloons counted as double and any bashing of balloons after the whistle counted as double too. It was a close fought battle, but in the end, the Cobra Patrol emerged victorious by a single point.

Next we started our Backwoods Program. Backwoods is basically the art of survival e.g. building shelters, cooking with no pots, fire lighting, use of tools etc. Tonight we were cooking Pita Pockets on a BBQ. Fiona explained about food prep and hygiene with some Q & A from the scouts. Next each patrol gathered the ingredients they had brought and made their food. We wrapped them in tinfoil and put them on the BBQ to cook for a while. There wasn’t much space, so some people had to wait a while. Fiona made some for the leaders while Alan kept an eye on the BBQ and Brendan took the new recruits to cover their Discovery Badge work and Ciaran helped the rest of the scouts. The Pita Pockets were delicious, even if mine did have mushrooms in it.

All in all, it was another successful meeting. Some of the scouts used a knife for the first time in their lives it would appear. These are all skills that we are going to work on next weekend when we have a full day in the woods.