Posted by Cynthia_Dschankilic on April 24, 2004 at 02:00:20 from 65.93.122.145 user Cynthia_Dschankilic.
I was very interested in the talk about the size of Wild Cat that was bandied about recently. I wrote a follow up but I'm not sure if it's too far down the list to get noticed so I'm starting a new thread if that's okay. My daughter is making a model of Wild Cat Island for a Home Educators' Project Fair. She was trying to calculate the size of the island.
We took John's swim around the island as a benchmark. The YMCA Star6 badge endurance swim of 600m (about 600 yds) was used as a circumference. We looked at AR's drawing and Mike Field's map (lovely, btw), and found the proportion of width to length to be about 3:7, and allowed 5 feet off the shore to give him room to kick without stubbing his toes. We estimate the island of AR's imagination to be approximately 133 yards by 54 yards, or 400' by 162'.
This seems to give adequate room for the goings on of the stories without placing unrealistic expectations on John's swimming abilities, (even if the day was hot and John was fired with indignation at the time).
At the corroboree last year we found that you don't have to be marooned on a very big island to be able to 'lose' each other in the brush. The vegetation appears very thick on Wild Cat so Amazons and Swallow alike could sneak around to good effect on a 400' by 162' island. Well, what do you think? Does the estimate seem reasonable?
Have you been to Peel Island? Since this was AR's inspiration we considered a field trip to the Lake Country ourselves,(we're in Canada), but thought it might exceed our education budget.
She's wondering what the vegetation is like; how tall are the trees, etc? Anyone hazard a guess? We know the lighthouse tree is 15-20' at the lowest branch and looks to be another 8 feet or more above that. What about the rest? Mainly Deciduous or quite a lot of evergreen? Are there many open patches besides the camp clearing? Any details would be appreciated!
Swallows & Amazons Forever, eh?