Woggleknot.com – An Explorer Scout's Blog

The Field Gun competition was tonight. The “Field Gun” was a bit better than the one we used at Bradley, and it could stay in one piece without anybody having to hold onto it.

I was supposed to be helping the leaders, but one scout troop didn’t have enough people in the team so I ended up actually taking part in the competition.

The obstacles were really good, and it was a bit similar to the stuff you could see in the video I posted last week. The scouts began by dismantling the field gun. There were three obstacles on the course. The first was a small wall with a hole in – equipment was passed through the hole and the scouts had to climb over. The second obstacle was barrels stacked up in a pyramid shape – the scouts had to climb over and pass the parts of the field gun over. The third obstacle was a rope and pulley which the scouts used to pull themselves and the field gun parts across from one side to the other. Once all the parts and people were across, the field gun was rebuilt and the scouts had to run back to the beginning of the course.

It was slightly embarrassing being quite a bigger than all the other scouts taking part, but it was still fun.

Next Friday there is a competition called the nighthawk challenge, which Bradley Scouts are entering.

In the competition, the scouts have to hike from checkpoint to checkpoint through the night (and into the morning). The checkpoints are only open at certain times, so Scouts must arrive within a certain time window, or they are disqualified. The walk is usually around 12 miles long. However, the walk isn’t the hard part.

There is also team of Adult volunteers called “Hunters” who split up and search all the areas where scouts could be walking, and any scout troops that get found loses a point. The scout team that reaches the finish point ,and has lost the least amount of points, wins.

Scouts must decide on which routes they should take to each checkpoint, and they should choose routes that hunters are least likely to find them on. In order to win the competition, a lot of decision making and good tactics is necessary.

I managed to win the competition last year with my team, and hopefully the team from Bradley Scouts this year will do well too!

Tonight the scouts were practising for a field gun competition next week on Friday. We built our very own field gun and made some obstacles to practise with. There were horizontal poles to crawl under, tables to crawl over, chairs to run across , and chairs to weave in and out of. The scouts started off with very slow times, but after many practises on the course and discussion of tactics, they managed to improve their times by working as a team. One of the teams managed to get a time that was under half of the original time.

However, although I call it a “Field Gun”, it was actually a milk crate tied to a wooden pole and two old tyres were held to the side of it. It sounds funny, but does it really matter if the scouts still had lots of fun?

In case you have no idea what a Field Gun Competition is, watch this: