David Currie

718Last weekend saw the British Orienteering Champs come to the New Forest. Things didn’t get off to a good start for us – Emma started to develop spots on Friday which by Saturday morning looked very like chicken pox. In the end Emma did come to Hampton Ridge (where there were at least two other children in a similar predicament!) but Christine had missed her run by this point. I may as well have missed mine. I was off as first starter on M21L but certainly wasn’t the first to find number one on my course! You can read the gory details in my comments on RouteGadget (Course 8). Mercifully our shift helping didn’t prove too onerous (although we have been jointly responsible for creating all of the information material for the event).

Things went a little better on Sunday at Beaulieu. Christine’s relay team with Jane Morgan and Tamsin Moran finished second in the Womens Short. My team on Mens Open had Sam Massey off on first leg followed by Peter Smith on second. The winning team was just crossing the line as I headed out in to a largely empty forest. This didn’t give me much of an incentive to run fast but I could at least concentrate on the navigation. This generally paid off although I made a really dumb mistake on the long leg to 14 which cost me a couple of minutes. I certainly enjoyed myself a lot more than on the Saturday. Again, you can see how I fared on RouteGadget (Course a-BCA). Our team also finished in second place although sadly second from the bottom of the results!

All in all, SOC and the other SCOA clubs put on an excellent weekend of orienteering in what was never going to be the most interesting terrain.

I didn’t have much time out with the camera but there’s a small selection of photos from the Individual and Relay over on Flickr.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Family, Orienteering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.