Welly Relay

What a beautiful evening to be out and about. We spent almost the entire session tonight out in the park.
We started off with some jousting. With bamboo lances the cubs had to collect gold rings held aloft by our young leaders. The team with the most gold rings at the end would win. In order to rouse the cubs before hand we tried to get them to roar.
"What would a knight do before going out to joust!"
"Get up on his horse!"
Not the answer we had in mind but they got there in the end and the joust was on.
Its not as easy as it sounds. The lances are long and thin but the rings are small. And no one told the explorers to keep them steady.

Once that game over we had a welly relay. This one was easy. You fill your welly with water, run around the hall and then empty the (remaining) water into your bucket and pass the welly to your teammate. The first team to fill their bucket wins.
The instructions use 'remaining' so there is an expectation that some water will be lost from the welly during the run around the hall. However, once cubs started arriving back soaked with little or no water we discovered that the explorers had again added their own element into the mix. They were stationed halfway around, armed with water pistols. Now our cubs aren't going to let an explorer squirt them and not retaliate, especially if they are holding a welly full of water!

In order to let the cubs dry out a little we then organised a traditional obstacle course race.
Team 1 had to go over the climbing frame and then slide down the big slide at the opposite end of the park and return to the start. Team 2 had to go the other way. Once they arrived back one team complained that they had further to go. Naturally this means that they had to run it again but in the opposite direction. There were no comments about it the second time.

We headed back into the hall for a drink and a biscuit and to introduce the Animal Carer Activity badge which we want the cubs to work towards over the summer.

It was then back outside for the water balloon shot putt game.
The objective here is to lob your water balloon into the bucket for points.
As we completed setting up for this game we recognised how similar this looked to bucket ball. Bucket ball is like basket ball but instead of throwing into a basket mounted to a pole, you have a teammate hold the bucket and they can move it to catch a wayward shot.
Since the explorers had added their own mark to the other games tonight we felt bucket ball with water balloons would be a fitting variant.

The cubs were certainly excited about this, the explorers less so once they realised there were three of them and three buckets and that Dave, Gillian and I intended them to hold the buckets not us!
To their credit they accepted then and got stuck in. 
It took only a few moments to figure out that they would not get we if they actually caught the balloons as the water would not come out of the buckets. If they did catch a balloon then they would have water in their bucket which could be thrown at a cub.

Lets just say that almost everyone got a little bit wet.

A couple of rounds of mosquito tig finished off the evening.