This year, I am in charge of organizing my SAR team's annual meeting. We're going to do all sorts of fun things related to SAR throughout the upcoming weekend. Mantracking, knot practice, advanced compass workshop, swiftwater rescue primer, night searches, canine stuff, proper firearm handling (unloading <g>), high/low angle rescue techniques, etc.

So basically we have lots of stuff to talk about and I am lucky to have other volunteers that will take care of their given aspects.

I am in charge of organizing the search simulation part of the weekend. This is scheduled to last a whole afternoon and I wish to make things interesting for both new and experienced searchers. In the past, i've organized a few of those simulations, but they were modest. An hour or so before the actual event, we simply went in the woods to hide some clothing items, beer bottles, and so on. After that, we would simply assign specific areas to the teams and would monitor their progress over VHF radios.

I'd like to spice up things a little and make things more fun and most importantly, feel "new" to my people. I was thinking, maybe change the course of things during the afternoon, for example, asking a team to change course and perform a specific task... things like that.

I'm pretty exhausted from all this preparation and I was wondering if any of you had ideas that I could implement within a limited budget and time for preparation? That could be helpful and I would be delighted to try some new things I haven't thought about yet.

Thank you!