Shooting Campout and Moms’ Dinner

At about 6:00 PM Friday afternoon, 33 scouts, 5 Webelos scouts and 8 adult leaders and 5 Webelos dads arrived at the Durham County Wildlife Club and set up camp right away.   At 7:00PM, we went up to the clubhouse for our safety briefing and then the adults and some of our Eagle Scouts went out to field 2 and shot Trap under the lights until about 9:45PM.   By then it was getting pretty chilly so everyone was looking forward to climbing into their nice warm sleeping bags.

Early Saturday morning, while the scouts were cooking and eating breakfast, a couple of the adults headed up to the ranges to get ready for the day's activities.  We set up the BB guns and targets on the pistol range for our visiting Cub Scouts and we opened up three of the club’s 6 shotgun fields for the morning session.    Nine of our scouts would work on their shotgun shooting merit badge and 17 others were signed up for recreational trap shooting.  Due to some mechanical problems, we got underway about 20 minutes late, but by 10:15AM, the merit badge shooters had finished up and 5 of the 9 had qualified for the badge.  All 9 had a lot of fun!    The trap shooters, however, were just getting started by that time!  Given the number of boys that wanted to shoot trap, we kept one field open until noon, but even that wasn't enough.  At 3PM , we opened up a trap field again and some of our scouts shot until about 4:30PM     Between the Friday night adult shoot and the Saturday sessions, our group shot 45 rounds of trap and 18 rounds of skeet!    Special thanks go out to Mr. Ed Rabenda for once again coming out to instruct and coach our scouts on the trap field.  This is the fifth year in a row that Mr. Rabenda has helped us out.

At 10:00, the Webelos were done with BB gun shooting so we set up two .22 caliber target rifles and set up the 50 foot targets for our rifle merit badge shooters.   For the next two hours, and again for one hour after lunch, we had scouts on both rifles - 7 out of 7 qualified!    Several of the scouts also did some recreational shooting on the 100 yard position, putting one of the steel rams through its paces with one of Mr. D’s rifles.

At noon we all headed back to camp for a quick lunch, mostly consisting of sandwiches, fruit and chips, although I didn’t get to see every patrol’s lunch.

From 1-3PM, the scouts and our visiting Webelos took to the Archery range.  Two of the DCWC’s archers, Mr. Lee Peedin and Mr. Joe Rozmus, were very gracious in providing instruction and in making the club's equipment available to our scouts.  This was a real treat compared to previous years when we scrounged up a few bows from our scout families to share amongst all of the scouts.    We had 7 scouts go for the Archery merit badge and 3 qualified.  Again, all of the archery shooters had lots of fun!  

Once the shooting was finished up, the shotgun and rifle merit badge guys learned to clean rifles (one of the requirements) and then everyone was off to cook dinner.

As has become tradition for this outing, we also hosted our annual "moms' dinner" in which the Scouts' moms are invited to the club for a dinner that their sons cook using the skills they've learned through scouting.   This year, we did a buffet-style event where each patrol was responsible for providing one part of the meal.  Everyone cooked in camp and then delivered the food to the clubhouse where we ate.   The dinner was a great success, consisting of pan-fried chicken breasts, grilled shrimp, chili, shepherd's pie, macaroni and cheese, two kinds of salads and, for dessert, five different flavors of cobbler.     We ended the evening with a campfire program in the clubhouse that Ryan C. planned and presented.  Each patrol presented a skit, Mr. Meyer did a  recap of the days events and handed out some awards, Mr. Gay offered some words of wisdom in a Scoutmaster minute, and then Ryan closed the program with a dignified U.S. flag retirement ceremony.    It was a great ending to a great day.

Once the scouts said goodbye to their moms, everyone pitched in to clean up the clubhouse and headed back to camp.   Everyone was in bed by 10PM after a very busy day.  With temperatures down into the low 40s, it was a great night for sleeping!

•         Gary M. for planning the scout assignments throughout the day and for running the dinner           portion of the moms’ dinner

•         Brian D. and Gary M. for running our safety briefing on Friday night.

•         The scouts who worked with the Webelos throughout the day to make sure they had fun,                learned something, and stayed safe:  Gary M., Kevin M., Jack K., Sean L., Sam H and Alex G. 

•         Aaron R. for taking the lead in planning and coordinating the mom’s dinner menu and patrol           assignments (that was a big job!). 

•         Ryan C. for a great campfire program  

•         The DCWC for letting us use their facilities each Fall

I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend - I'm already looking forward to next year's outing!

Chris Meyer