From the 8th to the 10th April was our annual 'Patrol Camp'. This is held every year as preparation for the week long 'Troop Camp' which happens later in the year.
I arrived about 1 hour late because my work experience (see last post) didn't finish until half an hour past the start of camp, and joined my Patrol. They had already put up the patrol tent so I helped put up the (new) dinning shelter, we then gathered all our personal and patrol kit and put it to the relevant tents. Afterwards we all went into the mess tent for hot drinks and we got a intimidating talk from Simon before we went to bed.
The next morning we had a continental breakfast (croissants with jam and cereal) and spent to morning setting up our patrol sites (gadgets, roped off, making sure tents are put up correctly and neatly etc...) and each patrol had a slot on rotation doing archery. We then stopped for a brief lunch of sausage rolls, crisps, fruit and cake. In the afternoon we all worked towards our outdoor challenge badge (or outdoor challenge plus for those, like me, who had already completed it). I learn't some first aid with James and helped some of the younger scouts complete some of the things that they needed to do. By the end of it I realized that the only thing I needed to do to complete the plus badge was to sleep out in a bivi/poncho shelter so me, Tom and Alex convinced Simon to let us sleep in one that night. We then cooked an assessed dinner on our patrol fires which went quite well.
For our evening activity, Me, Tom and Alex walked to Nunny castle (a reasonably local ruin) where we hid and waited for the rest of the scouts to arrive with the leaders. Simon had a radio as did we so we were given 5 minutes warning before they arrived. The scouts mission was to throw five glow sticks into the castle, what they didn't realize is that we would be throwing them back out. Much as this was a good idea it was somewhat shortened when after about 30 seconds all the glow sticks ended up in the moat.
Me, Tom and Alex then went off ahead again and arrived back at the campsite quite soon where we put on the hot water and had a doughnut. When the leaders and the rest of the scouts got back we went and set up our poncho shelter which was luxuriously constructed of five ponchos before getting our mats and sleeping bags and going to bed.
The next morning we got up and Tom and Alex were told to take down the shelter while I went to help my patrol cook our assessed (full English) breakfast. After breakfast we had the main inspection which went quite well. We then went down to the river and built mini rafts (we did this on troop camp in 2008 and it was a great success) after we had built them we set fire to them and floated them down the river. My one and Tom and Alex's ones got the furthest. We then walked back up to the campsite and took down the patrol sites, tents etc... and started to loads up the trailer. We then had a break for lunch and tried out James hammock which he had set up. We then took down the main mess tent and finished loading up the trailer and the cars.
We then had the final flag and went home.
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