Red Dawn Weekender – Island Recon – Pre-Game write-up

Before I start: Please note this is the Pre-Game write-up. The game will be coming later in the week.

I'd like to start by talking a bit about the bad start to our weekend. In fact, DarkSaber's bad start to the weekend.
Prior to actually getting anything in the way of Airsoft under-way, she took a slight tumble down the steps outside our house while loading the car. At the front of our house we have paving slabs as steps with a shingle drive. When stepping onto the slabs it is wise to ensure that your footing is correct and you don't slip off them and twist your ankle in the process otherwise this happens:

Ouch indeed.

This of course resulted in not much play from DarkSaber over the weekend, and a dash around Newport on Friday getting pain killers, ankle supports, and deep freeze gel.

So anyway.
On Friday we travelled over to the IOW and landed in Cowes then drove off to meet up with NightWolf. After bundling NightWolf into the car we set out on some errands to help get the site prepped. So it was off to get a USB stick then a journey to Staples to get a load of paperwork printed.
We then pressed onto the site to start the prep work there.

We arrived to be greeted by Mark and his wife who had already been doing some work on the site during the day although they had to leave shortly after.
From there NightWolf and I set out to erect a "comms tower" and scatter gold bars through-out the site for the game start on Saturday. That in itself took quite a bit of time as we had to walk the entire length of the site at least twice as well as its entire width (including the ridge) to ensure a nice distribution of gold.

To give you a good idea of just how large this is, I shall illustrate with the use of Google maps

Of course remember that this is the distance AROUND the site, not end to end.
If we were to roughly plot how far we walked:

Not too bad really, but that's just a guess and isn't accurate, in fairness it was probably slightly more than that. In 25C, in the woods which turns pretty much tropical and humid, it feels like a very long way but it had to be done to ensure some of the set pieces were ready for the Saturday.
Foolishly I was not wearing the proper socks with my boots to do this and I don't have particularly hard feet, so I wound up with nice blisters by the end of the day.

DarkSaber sensibly sat and rested up in the Safe Zone.

There was more running errands that day and plenty of driving to fetch things and getting things set-up. By the evening everyone that had turned up during the mean time, and including us, were getting hungry so some of the lads went on a KFC run.

DarkSaber and I pitched our tent and by the time this was done, the boys were back with the food. We drank and ate until about midnight wrapping up a beautiful day of hard work preparing for the game on.