I did very little cropping of my photos of yesterday so that you could take in the full expanse of the absolutely perfection we were blessed with along the shores of Mother Tarleton.  Heaven itself cannot be much better.

In the last of my series of photos you can see Mike Wiff with his hand up in an attempt to stop the photo op.  Seems that the board was incomplete and there was even more on the agenda than shown.

Indeed, we have hit our second session stride, and as predicted, it happened a bit faster than first time around.  Of course, there still are some soft moments for the boys, but these occasions are now very much in the minority of happenstance and are of short duration when they do occur.  Simply stated, the hesitancy has given way to a surrender to the pure fun of camp.

You should have seen those seniors bolting out the door when it was announced that they were taking an impromptu trip to the Moose Scoops ice cream stand in cahoots with the girls from Camp Merriwood.  No surprise here when this gang was nowhere to be seen when we assembled at the council fire at about 8:15 for closure of a different sort than the day before.

Sara captured that moment, as we all sat quietly awaiting a flashlight greeting from the overnight campers on Webster Cliff across the lake.  After a few false alarms (boys have quite the imaginations) a bona fide beam flashed into view.  On our side, a large number of boys assembled at lakeside to return the signal.  We hollered a couple of times, likely in violation of local sound ordnances, in hopes of being heard from afar.  Maybe but likely not.

I’ll be fetching this group in an hour or so, at the Appalachian Trai junction with our street, Route 25C, just 1.7 miles up the road from camp.  I’ll get their full story then.  The other three trips from yesterday all reported great success.  The Percival group stunned me by insisting there were caves on Mt Morgan, not Percival, and we concluded just now that there are such cavities on both mountains.

The Chocorua group was made up of some of our strongest varsity hikers and it came as no surprise to  me that they passed two other camps groups on their dart to this magnificent summit.  I honored their endeavor by telling the Legend of Chocorua to the council fire assembly after the mayhem of the flashlight tagging ended.

The Connecticut River IS the place to fish in August and the group returned after dark last night with just one very large bass, the many many other catches of the day having been released back to their natural habitat.  One such let-go was a 25 inch Northern Pike, who fell a few inches short of being a legal keeper.  Good.