Troop84.com has had some upgrades in the last couple of weeks! We are now tracking Camping Nights, Service hours as well Hiking, Bicycling, and Canoeing miles on our site and it is all tied into the event registration system. Scouts, have a look at your account page on troop84.com and compare our records to your own camping/service/hiking/bicycling/canoeing miles logs to make sure everything is up to date. We are working hard to retrieve records from prior to 2014 and incorporate them into our site. You can click on the numbers in your Camping, Hiking, Service, Bicycling, and Canoeing Log to see details on each event you earned nights, hours, or miles or you can go to the troop wide reports and click on your name. The old "Leaders Links" tab has been renamed "Reports" and several new reports can be found there.

Merit Badge Super Saturday is a great way to earn a lot of the hard to get Merit Badges. Sessions fill up almost immediately, so you should sign up as soon as you can.

If there is enough interest, we can see about arranging a car pool.

You can see a full list of the sessions offered and register at this site:

http://scouts.mbsupersaturday.org

A common question for new scouts is “What do I need?” There are basic pieces of gear every scout should own for any outing and then there are items that are highly recommended and some others that are “nice to have”.

Parents should have all received email invitations to scoutbook.com. Once connected to scoutbook.com, parents can invite their scouts to join and both parents and scouts can not only see the scout's progress, both ranks and merit badges, but can themselves check off achievements as the scouts complete them. Leaders will then approve any achievement recorded by the parents and/or scouts. Please connect as soon as you can and invite your scout!

Here is some advice from my favorite online Scoutmaster, Clarke Green:

The most important thing about a Scout’s backpack is a proper fit. The second most important consideration is whether it will fit them next year, let alone three years from now. A top-of-the-line $400.00 backpack that doesn’t fit properly or grow along with a Scout is not only a waste of money, it’s going to be so uncomfortable a Scout will think twice before he goes camping or backpacking again.

Here is a link to the full article he wrote and be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the page!

http://scoutmastercg.com/gear-guide-scouts-backpacks/