First orienteering for Duncan

At two weeks old we thought it was about time Duncan experienced some orienteering so we all headed along to SOC’s local event at Avon Tyrrell today. “Local” is a relative term as, being on the far side of the New Forest, it’s nearly 30 miles each way for us to get there. Christine took Duncan and Emma round the white course whilst I did the score event. Simon Whipple had planned an imaginative course to make the most of a small area. There were two sets of master maps, one at each end of the area with half the controls on each. My brain wasn’t entirely switched on having spent an hour or so up with Duncan in the middle of the night and hence trying to track which of 34 controls I had been to proved taxing. Also, despite having been told that one control had the wrong code on it I still ran around like a headless chicken for a couple of minutes when I came to it. It would also have been helpful if there had actually been a feature on the map in the middle of each control circle!

I hadn’t been to Avon Tyrrell before but felt it would make a good little area if mapped a little more precisely. It was perfect for Christine taking Emma round in the running buggy and it was always good to see so many new faces at the event.

20091017 Avon Tyrrell GPX

2 Responses to “First orienteering for Duncan”

  1. Grandad says:

    Good to see you all getting out. I am waiting for Christine to get back to competition but recognise it is a bit early!
    I acn’t work out how you punch the controls at more than 8km/h – I need more practice at control flow!

    • Dave says:

      No – I can’t work out how I do it either! I guess it must be using some sort of moving average when it plots the graph so you never see the stationery bits – I certainly stopped to mark my map up!