My favourite bases

It’s tough deciding which bases I enjoyed the most. All of them were valuable, and I learned a lot.

The electronics base was fun, not because of the electronics, but because we were visited by a large boomslang who decided to investigate our table. It was like a scout explosion, it’s amazing how fast people can move when they’re motivated.

I enjoyed the shooting base, because I turned out to be good with a shotgun, despite the first shot knocking me over backwards. I got the highest number of skeets, and, as a reward, got to shoot a .303 scoped rifle and pulverise a rock so far away we could barely see it.

Rock climbing (pictured) was a definite favourite. Especially the abseiling down.

Water base was enjoyable simply because it was water, and we were very hot. I managed to windsurf all the way across Clanwilliam Dam before I realised that I had no idea how to tack against the wind. I had to be towed back by a motorboat. Parasailing was the highlight of that base.

I think my all time favourite though was paintball. Crawling through the bushes, creeping up on your opponents, and giving them lovely bruises. It was most enjoyable.

When we got to the base, we found that a rival patrol who had been dogging us for a while was slated to be our opponents. They had a couple of egotistical folks, and they’d been doing the cederberg equivalent of trash talking us for the last couple of days. As a bonus, there was a journalist there who would be taking pictures, and he had brought his 11 year old son with him. He asked if his son could join in. The kid was a little overweight and geeky, so our opposition passed. We happily welcomed him onto our team, since we were out to enjoy ourselves, not “win”.

Our pistols had a “feature” where if you carefully uncocked it, you could pump a second charge of gas into the chamber and essentially double the velocity of your paintball. A couple of us, while waiting around, had also “accidentally” left some of our paintballs sitting in the sun, which has the unfortunate habit of reducing the chance of them breaking and getting you a kill, but also produces the most amazing bruises when fired from a double cocked pistol. It also hurts like hell.

The game started normally, a standard “capture the flag” scenario. At this point, the opposition team discovered, the hard way, that a number of our patrol were excellent stalkers. They also discovered, to their dismay, that the 11 year old kid somehow could not miss. He racked up an impressive amount of kills. We were donating ammunition to him because he could single handedly hold a choke point while the rest of us would sneak over, steal the flag from behind, and take it back to our base.

We won handily, and it was a dispirited, and very black and blue, patrol that left the base with us. There was no trash talking for the rest of the hike.