To be very honest, I have never had much time for Venturing.

Maybe because I have been so involved in traditional Boy Scouting and the structure it just wasn’t a good fit for me?

I do believe that we do need something for our older youth and that was my reason for starting a Sea Scout Ship.

Back then Sea Scouts were part of Venturing but we just didn’t tell anyone! (Joke.)

Some of the Venturing Awards were really good – I’m thinking about the Ranger Award.

Some Councils have somehow made Venturing work and work well. – Sadly that isn’t the case where I live.

Without wanting to go into details there was at one time a lot of “Paper Crews” Crews that should have been in LFL but the LFL numbers looked better if they moved into traditional membership.

While Sea Scouts and Venturing are not the same.

Here are a few of the problems that I ran into.

Without wanting to come off as being in any way sexist the truth is that girls of this age are far more advanced then the boys.

Given just a little training they will leave the boys in the dirt.

I didn’t have any success recruiting younger youth.

Most of our members (We had 27 Sea Scouts.) were aged about 16.

The boys tended to be Scouts who had made Eagle but were interested in remaining in Scouting however what they were getting from their Troop was the same old same old and sad as it might sound some voiced the opinion that they were fed up looking after the little kids!

Most of these Lads were active in the OA and many like my son worked at summer camp -This made planning a Summer event kinda hard.

Of course when it came time for them to leave for college our numbers went down really fast.

These youth are really busy.

Trying to find open dates to do weekend trips / activities is hard.

I’m not sure if it was just my group? But very often it seemed that no matter how enthusiastic they seemed for something at the time, if something else came along even at the last minute, the last minute event won out.

These kids are broke.

Being a young person today isn’t cheap so the lightly hood of them having extra money is very rare and parents have reached their limits.

Trying to help them organize fund raising events is hard because they are so busy or they just fail to turn up on the day.

The boys are no longer cute and no one is going to buy stuff from them!

It can be hard for them to accept new members.

Sure they know it’s a good idea but they very quickly form something very much like a family and close ranks.

Many of the local Troops seemed to think that we were in the poaching business -This was never the case.

My fears about working with girls were totally unfounded.

I had only ever worked with boys, never had a daughter, but it was sheer joy.

We camped a fair bit and did a couple of weeks Sea Kayaking down in Savannah Georgia, the girls were just as at ease with having no facilities as the boys were.

One of my girls went on to serve as the Aquatics Director at our Council camp while one of my boys served as program director.

I was very much for it being their Ship and us doing what they wanted to do.

Some of the things they wanted to do were when they looked into the cost just too expensive.

They talked about Sea Base but it was too much, even going white water rafting close to home was a bit too much.

They enjoyed rappelling (I have all the gear.) Caving was always fun as was all night bowling and traveling down to go out with the Sea Scouts down in Maryland.

Working with youth this age is a lot of fun and well worth the effort.

We did close the Ship down once the membership fell below six Sea Scouts we just couldn’t make it work at that time.

Eamonn