Last Thursday, the whole of the Third Form went on a Field Day as part of CCF. Cadet Otis Meneses-Bautista kindly reported on the trip.

“I started my CCF journey on Thursday and as soon as I got on the bus, I knew this was going to be a fun trip. The bus journey was about 90 minutes but it was worth the wait as soon as we got off the bus, we were told to form up.

We were not looking as smart as we should of so the NCOS showed us how to properly do our uniform. We were split into different groups. My group went to make bashes after the parade and completed a drill with Flight Sergeant Thomas Llewellyn (Upper Sixth). After the drill, we had dinner and we were excited to find out it was lasagne!

Our NCOs were the Head of Corps, Cadet Warrant Officer Andrew Loy (Upper Sixth) and Flight Sergeant Thomas is Head of RAF Juniors so we were looking like a pretty good group. We went on a navigation exercise to different points of the CCF camp, searching for letters that would make up the words for a capital city and a country.  We were successful in finding most of them, my group found the most but we did not have a watch and sadly missed the deadline!

When we got back, it was dark and we began the night exercise. We were a group of captured soldiers who were being transported when we were ‘rescued’ and had to make our way, through enemy territory, to get back to safety. 

The next day we packed up our camp quickly and went to breakfast.  After a nice porridge, we formed up and we were split into different groups – mixing us up again so we could get to know different people.

Our first activity in the morning was about rations and what the army ate. We were given a map and compass – preparing us for the DofE expedition in October.  We then had a talk on how to leopard crawl, monkey run and roll as these are methods of moving stealthily.  We also learnt about the foot roll and the jungle roll. The activity ended with a relay race. We moved on to an observation where we had to find as many things in a defined area as we could and also identify two NCOs who were camouflaged and concealed.

The navigation task was next and my partner and I were given bearings and a distance to follow to find a specific point.  We were quite successful and were only off by two meters.

Our penultimate activity was the command task and I thrived in this aspect of CCF.  At first, we didn’t do so great but then we got to do the task where we had to move an egg with a string and I was leading. I commanded a team of 11 and we successfully moved the egg without dropping it – there was so much joy in the group at completing this little task – it was unexplainable!

Our last task was hide and seek and I was the only person to get back without being found.

We did our final parade where we got presented with our hats, then got on the bus and went home.

Thank you to Major Millbery and all the staff for organising such an enjoyable field trip.”