As mentioned earlier, the meet was great and it was a great chance to meet old and new folk (mostly new). We covered alot during this meet with each of us sharing our own experiences/techniques.
The site where we were was part of the Haddo Country Estate and basically in the gardens of it, but when you were in the fenced off area you felt as if you were miles away from anyone else on the site. Sunday happened to be a large easter egg hunt with plenty of children roaming around looking for eggs. Luckily we had a sign up saying no eggs in here so were not too bothered.
Over the entire weekend, we covered various things. Shelter building (both a lean-to and debris shelter/A-Frame), fire lighting using flint & steel, Douglas Fir Sap and Chaz with the bow drill, we also spoke about traps and even did a bit of netting and successfully caught a bunny on the Friday morning which provided an afternoon snack. My first time trying rabbit and it was pretty good. We managed to get the camp loom working that I had wondered about the workings of it earlier and the results were great. Oh and we had the bannock cook off and must say that KP and Chaz made some excellent bannock - must get the recipie off you guys at some point.
Saturday night we had our big pot of stew which each of us helped in making and it was really good. This was the only night that it rained, but it only lasted for a few hours and even then wasn't too bad under the parachute.
We were going to try star gazing as KP brought along his telescope but the cloud prevented us from seeing anything, well at least until 2am on Saturday night when I got up for the loo to be greeted by a cloudless sky.
We had a few hammock converts during this trip, out of all the people that were there, there were 2 tents and the rest all hammocking bar 1 who bivied.
So overall a great weekend and nicely organised by Craig. Hope to see you all again soon.
Andy
