So as I mentioned, we were the runner up on Sky Camp by just 15 points out of a possible 4,000 and I’m just a little bit gutted by that, as we thought that we had done enough to clinch it.. heck the team who beat us also thought that we had won it.

Not sure I did a good enough job of expressing just how much fun it was, but hey not going to address that now.

So where could we improve?
1) Camp craft during the building process.  While there was no litter on our site, our build process lacked style, and quite a bit of our kit was just in a heap.
2) Late dinner.  We should have started our cooking fire earlier, our first fire was too small and then we lost time resetting and letting that bed in so we could carry on cooking.
3) Use of wet pit.  Not convinced by this one, as we felt that not using a wet pit was bad practice.
4) Falling over on assault course.  Couldn’t really help this one but it did lose us at least 10 seconds, making us one of the slowest teams for this challenge.
5) Use of found materials / objects.  We didn’t do a good job of looking for found objects that we could have introduced to our structure.
6) Poor build of wind chimes.  One of the challenges was to build wind chimes, and mine didn’t chime and would have taken a _lot_ of wind to move..
7) Build of welcome sign.  Another challenge, our poster was quite small and drawn from stuff we had brought.
8) Forgetting to wear tiaras at dinner. No comment.
9) Not very clear theme.  Our theme was the queen, which ended up being a bit weak.
10) Not very creative team name.
11) Conservative choice of menu for dinner.  We could have been more ambitious.
12) Poor cooking fire containment.  We accidentally set fire to our seating platform underneath our cooking fire.  Oops, think that we might have got away with this one.
13) Time spent on the ground to tend fire / do other stuff.  We should have tried to do these things while in the shelter.

Just so I’m not all doom and gloom, what things did we do well:
1) Vastly improved camp craft on Sunday, we all remembered that we were in a competition, so kept the site tidy during the clear down.
2) Wallpaper – yea, we put up wallpaper.
3) White table cloth, laminated menu and candles for dinner, shows attention to detail and that the 3 course dinner we were serving had some class.
4) Good use of space.  We used all of the available trees as part of our build, so that our shelter was really quite big.
5) Solid lashings, and well built structure. Each of the pioneering poles used was very solidly attached, and we didn’t use many ratchet straps.
6) Creative method of getting our kit to site and not needing to spend points for additional journeys or equipment.  As leaders we were only allowed one trip, so we built a trolley that could be dismantled and used as part of our build.

Still it was our first time competing, so second is a very good result.
But we were just so close..