Saturday, March 27, 2010

Kontiki 2010 goes to El Dorado: Raft



Konitki was held from 5-7 March at , the old favourite, Murray Park in Springs. So for Kontiki this year we did something never been done before - we build a raft but did not launch it. We did this as the number and average age of troop did not allow us to build a raft to the standard we expect. However, as this is Adiero and we believe no activity should be wasted we decided to build a raft with the whole troop to show them how it's done so that next year the entire troop had experience of building a raft under Kontiki conditions. As this raft was a teaching exercise it did not need to be very big so a 4m x 4m raft was constructed with less super structure and decoration as we wanted to ensure that we would finish on time.





This idea was a great success. The Court of Honour arrived early at Kontiki to build a large part of the campsite and then when the rest of the troop arrived construction began on the raft. As the times of build changed this year - construction began at 18h00 - only 1 hour after construction could commence. As our 'raft crew' consisted of 11 people the base was done in an hour and a half followed by dinner and then further building until 24h00. At this point we had constructed the base, paddle wheel, barrels and beginning the super structure - all in all, great nights work.

Saturday morning began early and construction began right away - the super structure was completed as well as decking put on and the final touches of the decoration. We were ready for launch at 10:30 - 30 minutes ahead of actual launch.

After perching our raft just on the water's edge we anchored it in place and began our beaver challenge - which raft based. Cubs were required to get on the raft, with a life jacket, and count the number of large coins on the raft. This required exploring all areas of the raft -much to the cubs delight.

Overall, the raft was a great success, the scouts got to experience building a raft in a certain time and the cubs got to enjoy going on a raft. We came 22nd for the raft which is a great achievement as we did not complete in mobility which is a large percentage of the available marks.

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Monday, March 8, 2010

We are famous!

Our troop has come, been seen and (almost) conquered!!

We have been mentioned in two other scout blogs!!
The first is the SA Scout Association Gauteng Province, Chairmans Blog. Here there is a picture from Kay's Springbok Camp at the beginning of the blog.

http://gautengscouts.blogspot.com/

The second is Ropes and Poles - a really great pioneering blog run my Peter Le Roux from 9th Benoni Greyspear. Here you can see our famous octopod lashing that we did for our gateway. Thanks must be given to Peter for putting this on his blog in the first place so we could learn it.

http://ropesandpoles.blogspot.com/

Checkout these sites not only for our stuff for scouting in general.
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