Co-curricular News

Scouts Adventures

It has been another busy term for the Minerva Explorer Scout unit. At the start of term the Explorers designed their own unit badge.

They first looked at a range of existing Scout badges, identifying what they liked and disliked about each design before thinking about what special features they wanted to incorporate into the Minerva badge.

The final design combines the Chapel, complete with new doors, the Scout logo, the South Downs and six Sussex Martlets flying over the top. The design is simple yet effective and the badge has since been made, and the Explorers now wear it proudly on their uniform.

Other evenings included the Pancake Day challenge, which saw teams making the smallest possible pancake using only an egg, flour, milk, a candle and an empty tin can. An evening of games took place just as the evenings were starting to get lighter, and at the end of term was the Easter Egg hunt, which this year involved a smart phone GPS app!

This was the scenario facing a team of intrepid Explorer Scouts at the end of term on the first ‘survival camp’. The team first identified their priorities – shelter, fire, food and water, and over the course of the weekend built hammocks to sleep in from rope and plastic bags, lit fires using flint and steel, designed makeshift traps and built a water filter. They were taught the skills of finding north by the stars and the position of the sun, communication and signalling by glow stick semaphore and torchlight morse code. There was also some emergency first aid learning about different types of fire thrown in too. There were certainly no luxuries (apart from a couple of contraband packets of biscuits that snuck into camp)! Breakfast was a lesson in ‘foraging’, although the (carefully pre-selected) mushrooms cooked on a stick over the fire were not popular (somehow a large tin of baked beans seemed to also make it to camp).

A Challenge for Lancing’s Scouts

You are taking part in a Scout camp on a remote volcanic island when disaster strikes! The volcano erupts without warning. You grab a few bits of camping equipment, and you and your patrol escape on foot. You find yourself in a dense woodland. There is no phone signal, and you cannot go back due to all the volcanic ash. You are all alone and have no idea if rescue will come – or even if anyone knows you are here. What will you do? Will you survive?

For lunch the Scouts were given a whole fish to descale and fillet. Dinner arrived early to camp from College Farmer Jon Hutcheon, who brought some chickens and pheasants. He showed the Scouts how to humanely prepare the meat, and for dinner, the students cooked the chicken and pheasants along with potatoes and vegetables which were wrapped in foil and baked in the embers of the fire. After two nights sleeping in their hammocks, the team successfully completed the camp and were ‘rescued’ back to civilisation.

This camp was the culmination of the term’s focus on survival skills and all were awarded their ‘survival skills’ badge at the final flag down ceremony. Those who attended really pushed themselves well outside their comfort zone. At points they were cold, tired and hungry and this required tenacity, resilience and pulling together as a team. They should all be congratulated.

DR RICHARD BUSTIN Scout Leader