Monday, May 21, 2007

Having fun with Cub Scouts

Last weekend, I was in theoretically in charge of the COPE section playing games with Cub Scouts at the Cub Jamboree at Camp Snyder. for those of you who don't know what COPE is, look here, here, and here. The whole day was pretty fun; Tracy's observations on the group sanity of 7-10 year olds are pretty accurate.
One of my personal highlights of the day was about 3:00(maybe?) when I was looking at a rope we were using and I thought "Hey, we could tie this around those two trees and make a slackline out of it!" Well, we kind of did. I got one of the other instructors to help me, and we moved it to the trees and started tying one end. We did a bowline on one end and a trucker's hitch on the other, with a tautline hitch to secure it. Anyone who actually knows what slacklining is may tell me that it wasn't a slackline , it was a tightrope. Well, it's only a foot off the ground anyway, and besides, it gets worse:

The rope wasn't exactly a normal rope. It was a mooring hawser. A 5 inch mooring hawser. For the uninitiated, that means we used a very big, very heavy rope, used to tie ships to piers, instead of a normal climbing rope that's about 10 mm - under 1/2 inch, or climbing webbing that's flat and 1 inch wide. Yep. It was a huge hit; we had kids want to 'walk on the rope' for the next hour, and we had fun too.

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