What we used for each raft:

• Loads of rope
• 6 big barrels provided masses of positive bouyancy
• 5 long (2m) poles, 2 shorter (1.5m) poles
• 1 x LIGHTWEIGHT black plastic sheet as a awning
• 2 x 1m shorter poles to hold the awning up (we used rope for the ridge pole)
• Gaffa Tape :)
• Pallets to act as a floor, although I guess you could use table tops or similar
• LOTS OF STRENGTH to put the finished rafts in the water. We finished building them about 11pm - took waay longer than we thought it would, then realised there was no way between the few people that we had we were going to get them in the water as they weighed half a ton. Luckily, there was another camping group nearby, who came over with about 15 adults to help us. But my word, you get some odd looks going to a campfire 11pm in the evening and asking 'Excuse me, could I have some help getting these rafts in the water for my scouts to sleep on please'.
• Bounyancy Aids - common sense and my risk assessment (see below) suggested sleeping in bounyancy aids would be wise

Construction

Fairly straightforward I would have thought:

• We builf a standard type of raft formation, with 3 big barrels down each side, leaving a space in the middle where we lashed pallets on to sleep on
• We then added two vertical poles and a ridge pole made out of rope and draped a lightweight piece of black plastic over the top to act as a rain cover. This also stopped kids from falling in
• We used gaffa tape to attach the awning at each side to stop kids rollingg off the side of the raft into the water, although the barrels did that quite well anyway.
• Once the rafts were launched, we attached a long piece of rope to each one so that if the young people did need to get ashore in the night they could just pull on the rope. The lake at Tolmers isn't huge anyway!

Risk Assessment

You can have a look at the risk assessment I did for this activity here.

Back to Pioneering