Wow! We had a great turn out for the first working bee of the year. Quite a few of the new families as well as many of the old hands. We started out with Jeff's giant list and worked through and got an enourmous amount of work done.

You won't know the place.

A really big thank you to everyone who came and gave their time.

Tonight we had a combined night with Emerald's Cubs and Scouts, Upper Beaconsfield Venturer Unit and even one Jets Venturer and one Ogilvy Rover!

Elizabeth & Glenys & The Pack said goodbye to five Cubs as they went up into Scouts. This relieved the pressure on numbers in the pack, for about five minutes - this relief was only temporary as five new chums were given their white scarves as they start their journey.

The five new Scouts were welcomed by their new Troop and Leaders.

Holly has left our Scouts and gone up to Up Beac Vents - she just about couldn't stop smiling and I wasn't too embarressing in the farewell roast :).

Photos of the night will be posted onto an internal page.

...and to top the night off Mevan has agreed to be our Group Leader - thanks Andrew Thomson for relating your experiences as our GL.

Evil Mario - SL.

The new abseiling gear has now arrived. Thanks to the contributions from the groups that work with our team over the last year we've purchased fifteen new kits (harness, caribiner, and figure 8 descender) along with some new rescue equipment and a pile of new steel caribiners and slings to replace the ageing ones.

This latest purchase of five harness kits means that we can now handle the largest groups without having to swap harnesses part way through the session. This will allow the students to continue abseiling for the entire time of their booking.

The next major expense will be the registration of our leaders that only work for our team.

This weekend we held Leadership Camp for some of our current and future leaders. Ably helped by our latest Green Cord candidate Andrew.

The Patrol of youth Leaders certainly learnt some lessons. Some of those lessons were via hardship - simple things like turning sausages without tongs or having bacon and eggs with no eggs! Oh well, the important thing is that they made do and got on with it. A good outcome.

Andrew achieved sign off for some of the environment requirements of Adventurer Citizenship by taking the youth Leaders on a tour or part of Kurth Kiln Park where the environmental impacts were discovered, assessed and discussed. Some even managed a good turn by picking up rubbish and cutting strings from around trees.