In which Rabbitman jumps off a tall tower...

This past weekend I was on an extremely successful outing with the Cadets (an "FTX" in Canadian milspeak- 'Field Training Exercise'). Our senior Captain always brings her camera along and shared some pictures with me so I thought I'd blog about it.

New tents

The facility we were at (Peacekeeper park) has lots of amenities; a selection of good tenting sites, some cabins, a decent meal hall and kitchen, an obstacle course, access to a lake, lots of woods, space to set up an air rifle range and best of all an abseil tower!

High tower

So this year we did a biathlon with the cadets running around the obstacle course and then shooting sets of five rounds on the range, orienteering through the woods and abseiling. Other years we've done canoeing but the paperwork and logistics for getting canoes,paddles, flotation vests, instructors, safety procedures etc to take some cadets canoeing seem to be even more difficult than arranging to throw them off of a 60 foot tower.

Cadet abseiling

Air rifle range

Orienteering past a beaver lodge

Since it was the Mother's Day weekend we only had 30 cadets on the ground which was a nice manageable group so we had small teams rotating through each activity. Instead of getting only one chance to go down the tower some cadets went down 5 or 6 times, and they got the chance to do some extra target practice after the 'official' biathlon activity was done.

My friend and I got up early on Saturday to lay out the orienteering route. I'm glad to say that a couple of Junior Officers with compasses did NOT result in disaster. Although watching one of the teams come in from the wrong side of a marker (they had missed the marker they were heading for and went to a different one) and then go off on the wrong bearing was amusing. But they discovered their error, started over, made up their time and their team ended up with a perfect score.

One of my third year cadets, in charge of a team of younger cadets, was still pretty fuzzy on how to follow compass bearings, but I gave her a few minutes of extra tutoring and off she went to also get a perfect score and best overall time making her team the winners.

Overcoming his fear

This young fellow (picture above) faces a lot of challenges in his life and he was quite scared to go over the side, but the abseil instructor coached him through it and he was one of the cadets who went down 5 times. Another youngster lost her nerve right at the edge and apologized later, but the abseil instructor pointed out to her that she at least tried and got further than just staying on the ground. Things like that really make the lack of sleep, sun burn and constipation worth it.

Does this harness make me look fat?

Since the line up at the tower was pretty short, I also took the opportunity to give it a go. I haven't abseiled in about 30 years. My last time as a cadet it was cold and wet and the edge was pretty slick, causing some anxiety, so I wanted to reassure myself I could still do it.

Over the side

Trying a bound

All in all a pretty good weekend and a splendid tonic for the frustrations of the work week, as demonstrated by the grin on a fellow officer: