Les Barnes Competition!
On Saturday 25th March, our Scouts took part in the Les Barnes competition held in north Wiltshire.
We started at Coate Water Park and finishing at Barbary Castle Race Course. In this competition Scout groups from all over Swindon came to see who could score the most points from different challenges set out on a route – an incident hike. It’s a test of navigation, stamina, team work and Scouting skills. The Scouts had to plot half of the 6-figure grid references at the start and the others half way through. Part of the challenge was that you had to find the next stations, along the way our group had to help some other participants who were lost.
The challenges ranged from medium to hard but all had a level of difficulty, such as throwing a beanbag through a hole in a piece of wood to push a car on to a plank of wood; the objective was to give it enough force to roll to the end but not so much that it just stormed off the plank. I think the easiest challenge was picking up a bucket with rope and bungee cords but not being able to stand in the circle the bucket was put in. Then you had to transport the bucket without touching it and tip all the balls that were in the bucket into a container. The reason this was the easiest was we had encountered this challenge in Scouts a few weeks earlier as part of Scout games and Dave, one of our Scout Leaders, had helped us to master this.
My favourite part of the day was probably half way through when we were all holding on to each other’s bags and we all got pulled up the hill by Josh.
We all had a fantastic time spending the day on our own in the countryside of Wiltshire we found out loads about each other and we all want to do it again. We don’t yet know what place our team came because we have to wait for the results to be announced at the award ceremony.
By Archie, Age 11
