Residential Programme Update

     The residential students have finished their first month of the three month programme. During this first month, they have been working on their hickory bows, finished their primitive living structures, making herbal medicines, and fleshing their sheep skins.

     I originally thought that three days a week would be difficult to fill with skills and learning. As it turns out, all three students are swamps with too many tasks and skills to finish. I may need to back off a little bit for this next four week period before the Ranger Scout programme starts. If they think that they are way behind now, they will be completely swamped once that programme commences.

     For this week, we are learning primitive trapping, primitive weapons and advanced tracking. For the traps and snares, I am having them learn the modifies figure four trap and the rolling snare. We will see how this goes.

     The primitive weapons training will start with the tactical use of the self bow, but move on to some of the quickly made weapons. These will be the atlatl, sling, staff sling, rabbit stick and maybe the bola if we have time. They will be making their own sling to use for the rest of the summer. It can easily be converted into the staff sling with their walking stick.

     For the advanced tracking, Greg wants to find some Red Deer to put them on. They need to start getting acquainted with trailing the deer since that is such a great source of food and tools. Thankfully, there are many options here in South Kerry for finding deer to  track.

    

     The weather has been spectacular. Compared to last summer, the rain has kept it's respectful distance. We have had several days in a row with only sun. I prefer the rain. Whenever it gets over 20 I start complaining.

     This weekend is the summer Solstice. We are celebrating by offering a free weekend for about 20-25 people coming in from all over the State. It should be the best free weekend that we have offered to date. This time we have three Residential Students who will be taking over some of the instruction. I tend to push them towards teaching and hope that each of them starts their own programme wherever they land.