North of 49

So I got back from our Fall Bush Weekend in Air Cadets last night. Soon after I had a shower and relaxed for a few hours, it was off to Wakefield to see Natalie McMaster play at the Mouton Noir(Black Sheep Inn). My uncle is the drummer, so i got free tickets... It was a great show.


Anyway, back to bush. It was pretty fun, except for the rain and the cold. I had to lie down for 30 minutes on the cold forest floor waiting for cadets to find me. Twice. I played the downed pilot with mental distress, and it took both groups awhile to figure it out. It was a SAR simulation excercise. I pretty much just chilled by a fire pit for most of the weekend and carved a stick I found. The food made for us by the staff was very good, and they were very nice people. We also had to build bivouac sites. The ones the Officers/Senior NCO's built were a million times better than those of the cadets(who whined quite a bit). Anyway, many jokes and fun times were had. Not all of them within the cadet code of conduct.

Damn was it cold. We had to a have a massive roaring fire on the first night so that we didn't freeze. The second night, The Chief, the SWO, and myself slept in an ancient Arctic mod tent, but it was fairly warm. I could actually feel my face in the morning unlike the first night.

On a side note: While the cadets are new to this sort of thing, it's funny seeing them struggle with making a fire. They try to make it like they see in movies, even though that never works. Some didn't even pick up wet wood that would've dried instantly on the fire. One flight took over an hour to get a fire started. Ours took under one minute.

Also, we had a big fire pit, surrounded by a tonne of wet wood, but there was some good dry stuff underneath it, so we used that first, then dried the wet stuff on top of that. By Saturday morning, the coals were so hot, that all we needed to do was throw a few branches and logs on the pit, blow, and there we had a nice fire. The Cadets were awestruck, asking us how we did it. I told them it was the magical Fire Fairies of the Forest. This fire became our surrogate fire, even though we had a very nice one back at our old biv site.


P.S. I'll never forget this one year where cadets were on fire picket, and didn't put more logs on the fire. They just sat there watching it. My friend had to get up and get er going again. Fortunately I wasn't stuck with that flight that year.

All in all though, it was a fun experience, made better by seeing Natalie McMaster live at the Black Sheep Inn.