In January 2012 I joined the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), a "boy led" organization that promotes respect, honor, life skills, and personal development.
In reality? My troop is a one-hundred-ish group of 5th to 12th graders that are just figuring th...
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Every June our troop departs for summer camp, as I mentioned before, where we attempt to achieve our camp's highest award, the Gold Award. In order to get this you must accomplish several service activities to the camp, keep your camp facilities clean (shower blocks, tents, pavilion, campground, fire-pit, etc.), and build three pioneering projects. For those of you who don't know, pioneering projects are generally large lashings of sticks and twine. In past years we have done jungle gyms, cages, watchtowers, weather rocks (a story for another time), fishing pole stands, and archways but this year we wanted to do something revolutionary. This year we built a double decker couch. Yeah, you read that right. Double. Decker. Couch.
The idea was a risky one, as the disadvantages for it are clearly outlined in the Lego Movie, plus we had to find a way to make it practical and stable using only logs/tree branches and twine. It was a difficult project, but our Senior Patrol Leader, Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, and several others worked to design a great method of building it. Above you can see the end result, which was EPIC! The entire structure was exactly six feet tall, as the rules for camp were that you must use climbing gear if climbing any structure above sixe feet, and could support at maximum six people between the top and the bottom. Picture above are some of my friends and I (I am on your far left on the bottom row in green). Nobody pictured with me worked on it, but there were at least six others involved in the designing and building.
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In this picture you can see how many we got on it at once. On the night we finished it we invited the counselors from the waterfront (boating, swimming, and that type of activity area) to come out to our nightly campfire. There we had set up the double decker couch, complete with unused cot mats as cushions, and they were immensely impressed. Needless to say, we won Gold Award and it remains one of my favorite memories in Scouts. :D
The building of it, however, was not quite as much fun. We all loved lashing and knowing that we were all working together to built the greatest pioneering project in our troop's history, but that did not make it any less precarious. I particularly remember a jarring situation working on the top row when our Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, a good friend of mine and another guy from my year, was working on one side to lash the seat poles in place and I was working on the other side. At this point the couch was not anchored by stakes at all, it was just freestanding and very unstably at that. It was about lunch time so we were finishing up when I was doing the last lashing and he jumped down. Now, you have to know there was really no ladder or other structure used to get up where we were; it was just a 'find a way to make it up and down' situation where you just kinda find a new way each time and we both were standing on the lower bench to work on the upper one. Well, when he jumped off my weight was still on the other side so the whole thing leaned toward me and started to fall over. I jumped off in time, but it was still a little nerve-wracking.
Each lashing probably had to be re-done at least twice because they had a nasty tendency of loosening after they slid around a little on the poles, but it was still an incredible time working on it and remains one of our troop's greatest accomplishments.
