Cubs Report – 2009 AGM

We currently have 20 Cubs in the pack, which is down slightly on this time last year. As I mentioned this time last year, we have a predominantly young pack, so have not had many moving up to Scouts in the last year; this situation is now changing, but it won’t be until next year that we regularly have lots of Cubs moving up to Scouts.

Having not many Cubs move up to Scouts coupled with our Assistant Cub Scout Leader, Barbara (Chil) suddenly leaving during the summer holiday last year, and also our Young Leader David Ireland going to University, meant that weren’t able to take Beavers when they were due.

We do now have a new Assistant Cub Scout Leader, Suzy, who joined us just before Christmas last year. Her pack name is Baloo; I’m sure I’ll be corrected, but I can’t recall there being a warranted leader called Baloo in 1st Normandy Cubs before! However with just the two uniformed leaders, we do still need to run a parents rota, and around 20 Cubs is the most we can take at the moment. So we are really in need of another uniformed leader, given the amount of interest both from Beavers moving up and from outside the pack.

As of last September we changed the meeting time to 6:30-8:00 on Mondays.

Onto what we’ve been up to over the last year:

Before the summer holidays we entered 2 and a “bit” teams into the District Sports Challenge. We didn’t win the competition, but one team were the Volleyball champions for the day and the other team were the Hockey champions for the day. This means that over the last two years, we’ve won all four of the individual sports. Hopefully at this year’s event, this coming Saturday, we can win the overall title.

Last September we went to the District Camp at Runways End, and had 15 of the Cubs camping. On the Saturday, the Cubs joined up with the Beavers, Scouts and Explorers from the District to take part in a number of activities, such as Air Rifle Shooting, Archery, Pedal Go-Karting, Climbing, Caving and Canoeing. The Sunday saw 10 of our Cubs forming two teams to take part in the District Cooking Competition. Seeing as they’d had no preparation and were just given a recipe and ingredients, they both did very well, although the Boys team produced a Bolognese with some definite Charcoal nuances! I’d like to take this opportunity to again thank Roger Prime and Dave Chambers, who both gave up their weekend to come and help. If they hadn’t been there we couldn’t have camped.

The district handicraft competition this year had the theme of being stranded on a desert island with a “mountain” stream. The challenge was to design and build a model of the island. We entered two teams of 4. The standard of the models was very high, but unfortunately after two years of winning the competition, this year we weren’t triumphant.

However we did triumph this year in the District Quiz. I unfortunately could not make the event, but I heard that our team was a long way in the lead for most of the competition. The only downside to winning the District Quiz, however, is that it’s up to the leaders of the winners to organise the next years quiz!

At the end of last year, the Cubs made Christmas cards and gifts to sell at the Christmas show, as well as the props for their “3 years of Cub Scouting” song. We have continued running Pack and Sixers Forums each term, the most recent of which resulted in the Sixer’s run Paper Aeroplane Challenge evening. At the District St Georges Day parade two of our Cubs with the ADC Cub Scouts, led the Cubs in prayer.

We have recently returned from our May Camp at Bentley Copse. After having a river run through our site last year, we decided to camp at the Nest, which meant we had an indoor kitchen, and also had somewhere dry should it rain. The Cubs and Leaders did camp outside, and for the most part the weather was lovely. I’d like to thank Kevin Riley for transporting all our equipment to and from camp, Nick McEvett (or Bagheera as he’s now known) for helping throughout the camp and the ADC Cub Scouts for once again organising the food. Now our Cubs have a short presentation about what they did on Camp….

Just in closing I would say that as previously mentioned we are on the lookout, as always, for more leaders. On that subject, we are as always very grateful to the parents, who’ve given up their time to help at meetings over the last year.