GuyQuite excited about a bunch of #venturer #scouts being excited for another night doing #freediving with me. Finished the planning and risk control documentation today. Ready for next week.
Hmm, just ran a 'Spy Night' with the #scouts last night. It was a bit of a mixed bag. I'd put hours into preparing it, but it mostly fell apart when I tried to print out my work sheets last nights, and my home laser printer gave up. So I was 20 mins late, and I couldn't run through the plan with the other leaders to get the right knowledge for supporting the patrols on the different stations :-(
Running through it, I know now what needs to be changed to make it better, where I wasn't aware without a good 'dry run' that some things were a bit too complex.
Content wise, this was covered:
* Message transmission and encoding:
- Tap code
- Morse code
* symmetric ciphers:
- Pig Pen (Masonic) cipher
- Caesar cipher
- Rail Fence cipher
- Vignere cipher (didn't get to it, needs to be cut)
* steganography:
- Invisible ink (lemon juice)
- First letters of words in a paragraph
- A cut out mask over a (book) page
I've had a fun night yesterday. Went with a local #Venturer #Scout group (Beachhaven) to do a water safety and #freediving session. The 11 youth *loved* it all, and got lots of boxes ticked for their water safety badges up to level 7 (highest level). On top they've learnt heaps about themselves and how their body reacts, what the signals mean, and how to (re-) act on them, so that they would remain safe (e.g. while #spearfishing) or be able to spot trouble and assist.
It was heaps of work to get the pool across the line by making the case, planning, documenting safety protocols, writing safety documents, having sufficient supervision ratios, etc. But it was well worth it, and we want to do it again (next term or so).
A highlight was to also have a new venturer invested under water in the pool. The Scout Promise was more like a 'hummed column of bubbles', but it made us all happy.
Also, I finally got a photo and some video footage of doing a 70 m demo DNF swim in my freediving gear while wearing my scarf and woggle ;-)
Oooh, I'm all excited!
This week THU the venturers section of a local scout group (Beachhaven) is doing a #freediving session with me in a local pool. It'll be geared towards general water safety, particularly with respect to spear fishing (very common here). It took quite a bit of effort to get that across the line with the pool, but we've got a very good safety concept documented and agreed for it. The kids in the group are already very excited (just like me). They should be able to tick quite a few boxes for their next water safety badge requirements, too.
I've got hopes that the odd one may get into it and join our club (for more comprehensive training). And that we can pull this off for more sessions in the future too.
I'm also keen to get a picture of me doing a DNF (dynamics no fins) dive wearing my Mayfield scarf over my wet suit, too. :-D
Finally came up with two viable raft designs in our #scout group for the weekend's founder's day raft race event in our zone.
This week end is the first of the three pre-jamboree #scouts camps for this year. Unfortunately due to the bad weather forecast the first night (tonight until Sat) has already been called off :-(
Let's hope it lightens up for tomorrow.
The plan is to build and use rafts made from poles/bamboo, ropes and barrels only (in preparation for next week's founders day event), as well as camping skills.
What a great week end. Been at camp with our zone's #scouts for the Aotearoa New Zealand Sandford (leadership) course for existing and upcoming (assistant) patrol leads. Learnt heaps myself as well.
But now I'm knackered sleeping in the same scout hall with the other leaders and 30 hyped up kids for 2 nights.
The son, our dog and myself wearing our #scout scarves on World Scout Scarf Day today.
