Troop Summer Camp 2020 Part 3

Scout camp took place in January 2020 at Clanwilliam Dam on a Mango farm. I had been there before in 2014 with my family and other Scouters from 1st Muizenberg and 1st Bergvliet who were running the Water Activities Base for the Senior Scout Adventure (Cedarberg). It’s a cool campsite and the dam is great!

The campsite didn’t have much when we arrived but we set up our 3 man tents (much nicer than the big ones we normally take with) and a mess tent which even had a fridge and a plug to charge our phones!

The camp was great and we did lots of water activities, lots of cooking cool stuff on fires and in dutchies. I really enjoyed the cooking even though sometimes what we were cooking didn’t work out right.

One of the nights, David and Stan (Troop Scouter at 1st Blaauwberg) said we had to have a Survival night where we didn’t sleep in our tents. Luckily we had dinner before we left.

We set off on the Wednesday night going on the Survival night. We were walking for not that long, we originally got to a place close to where we were hiking but Stan told us we were lost and we had to go back, and then we went back and then Stan told us we were lost again and we had to go back. And a few hundred metres past where we had been before, we found the place we were meant to camp. But the problem was, the place where we were originally meant to camp was being taken up by a farmer and his car, I think he was fishing. So we had to camp on a flat bit of ground that was less sheltered from the wind but it wasn’t the worst situation ever.

When we got there, Stan told us that he got us lost so we would feel tired like we would if it was an actual hike where we got lost. David told us about the different types of shelters, including actually manually making a shelter using staves and a tarp, just a sleeping bag shelter and a few more. I went with just using the sleeping bag shelter because it seemed the quickest, easiest and I didn’t really bring anything else. I felt very warm during the night.

Michael, Todd & I found a rock to sleep next to, to put our bags against, and in Todd’s case, to put his staves on top. Then we went to sleep and I slept very nicely. Todd was in a tarp which was wrapped around his staves. Michael was in a body bag, on his mattress, in his sleeping bag, so he was very warm. I enjoyed the night, it was very fun and in the morning, just before breakfast, about 20 minutes before breakfast, we were woken up and we started walking down, back to where we were camping.

I enjoyed the Survival night and it would be fun to do it again.