Sea Scouting Inspiration Workshop

The purpose of the workshop came out of the core idea of a Eurosea event: to inspire people and share ideas. You can get really surprised; something that might be very basic for one person, might be very out of the box for someone else. 

The first part of the workshop was a little self-reflection. We had to think about the best water related activity that we had ever tried. Two questions that would help us were: 1. what made it so good? 2. did you learn something from that activity? This happened in complete silence – honestly, it was a nice surprise since most you do during Eurosea is talking to other people as much as possible. 

Surprisingly we did not have to share this immediately, so we were curious when and if something that would happen with this information later in the workshop.  

The next question we were asked was “what does a ‘normal’ water activity look like where you come from?” which we had to answer in the original form of a speed date. Kristine gave us some inspirational questions to get the conversation started: 2 minutes per speeddate, one for the inner circle to talk and the next minute for the outer circle to talk. It feel like after a couple of days you already know that Sea Scouting all over Europe is organised in a different way, but hearing it in detail from a couple of countries was quite cool!

Next Kristine provided us with a bunch of out of the box Sea Scouting activities that she attended or had heard of during her time as a potato scout ánd sea scout (she really became the best of both worlds). It’s up to you to figure out which drawing goes with which activity, but here I will share the activity ideas with you:

• Patrol of 4-5 youngsters sailing dhingys on their own for a week (leaders in a different ship)
• Small kids looking for live things along the beach, biology student giving them information
• Building a raft and sleeping on it
• Doing physics test like “does it float?” to figure out what can be left loose and what should be fastened in a boat.
• Home built boat race
• Partnering up with local sailing club for intensive/extraordinary sailing courses
• Harvesting food from sea gardens
• 10 day canoe trip as non-sea scouts during summer camp
• Gather a whole bag of trash and get an ice cream 
• Doing the same, but differently: canoing/sailing at night in stead of during the day
• Try out sailing simulators
• Simulate rescue situations in pool our outdoors

After her inspiring talk, we got to work ourselves: what event, partnership, activity, course, or other we would like to do or organize? She gave us the following things to think about:

By the way, did you notice this little guy on the right hand side of the poster? 😉

Finally we got to share our results of hard mental labour. What would we like to do, why would we like to do it and even maybe already a when too!

Mangus from Sweden would like to go ice sailing. It would be a (half) year project to teach the kids some planning as well. It goes from building the ice sailing boat to actually sailing it. He would introduce it in august so the youngsters have time to look up information and start the built. The finished product would be done by February or March to try out the boats they built!

Chiara from Italy would like to an event for oldest among the cubs which includes actually sailing. This is a thing cub scouts don’t do in Italy. This would have to happen on a national level with a big emphasis on the pedagogical level, because sailing for cubs has not been used before in the program. She would like to wrap up the project in two years, by the end of her term.

Sergei from The Netherlands would like to do something for their local groups. All his kids never went sailing on the lakes in Friesland, in the North of the country. So he would like to organize a group camp to go to Friesland. He actually had a phone call the day before this workshop and created a little task force to actually make it happen in the summer of 2019!

Aurore from Belgium had an idea for her district. She finds that activities around environment should be more present in these times we’re living in. We should be more aware of what we use and the trash we produce. She would like to insert a challenge in the program for all age groups. Every age group would have to choose an appropriate activity or project linked to nature, sea, animals,… That one activity or project will spark awareness for everyone involved

I think we can say that we got very much inspired, just as the description of the workshop promised. Some very lovely plans were created during this workshop. I definitely think it was the same case during other slots of this workshop.

Thanks to Kristine Clemmensen-Rotne, Denmark, Chairperson of Odysseus 13 to prepare this original and inspirational workshop!

Cliffhanger! We got to share our memories in the end, but I’m not going to share them here. I’m thinking about a more fun way to all share our best memories with each other 😉