David Currie

848Southampton Orienteering Club’s Summer Series kicked off today at Stoke Park Woods in glorious sunshine. There looked to be a reasonable turnout with plenty of new faces (the series being designed to pull in beginners as well as satisfying the desire of club members to have more local events). Christine went round the green course and I took Emma and Duncan around the yellow. I’ve been to the woods a couple of times before for RR10 races but have either been going too fast or, more likely, been too out of breathe, to notice the forest itself. There was talk of brashing but at least from the tracks it looked like a nice piece of compact woodland. More importantly for Emma, there were lots of streams for her to play in. We were back home by lunchtime which is a major plus. I’ve undoubtedly ruined my chance in the scoring system for the series by not running today. However there were a few other people missing, most notably due to the antics of Eyjafjallajoekull leaving them stranded in various parts of Europe. If we ever get our summer hols booked then there’s a fair chance we’ll miss 2 or 3 of the events later in the series anyway. The next event is on Southampton Common in a week’s time so see you there!

Having relocated our accomodation base to Saunton in North Devon it was then a long trek back down south to the first day of the JK individuals at Cookworthy Forest. A journey that we questioned whether it was worth it. One small mercy was that we were in the parking for those with under 6s close to the assembly field which meant we didn’t have the long bus journey (or wait for the bus) that others suffered from. It did, however, mean that we planned to just run straight to the start from the car. Half way there, there was a sign saying ‘No whistle, no go’ so I ran back to the car for a whistle and also picked up pins for a race number. When I got back to the race numbers there was no start list to tell you which number to take and I wasn’t going to run half way across the assembly field to find what my number was.

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839Having exchanged my parents for Christine’s, this morning we packed everything up in to the car and headed to nearby Bicton College for the JK Sprint Race. The college grounds provided a mixture of open fields, woodland and a complex of buildings. I was running M21E and the courses started out across the fields before heading in the to the woodland. This is where I faultered a couple of times, struggling with the large scale for what is otherwise classic orienteering terrain, as shown by my GPS track on RouteGadget. That was more than enough to see me way down in the results. After some sunshine, the rain returned in force whilst we waited for Christine to finish. Ambulances aren’t an uncommon sight at orienteering events given the nature of the sport but the arrival of a police car is always somewhat worrying. It was only later in the day that we heard the tragic news that Dave Stubbs from Berkshire Orienteers had passed away whilst out on his course.