David Currie

We went orienteering for the first time in ages today and it showed! We were down at Dibden early to set out the string course (yes – it’s come to that!) so my brain wasn’t entirely engaged. Things started out well enough on my course with reasonable speed and not much requried in the way of navigation. On the way to five I somehow decided I was running along the fence to the south of the control and when I didn’t see a bend in it decided I had overshot. It was only after wasting about three minutes that I eventually hit the open ride and twigged what I had done.
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We went along to Southampton Common this morning for the opening of the orienteering club’s latest permanent orienteering course. The map comes with three course suggestions which I duly ignored and instead went to see how fast I could get all 26 controls visiting them in any order. It took me 29’11 over 6.1km but, given the size of the red and white markers (about 1.5″ square) and the propensity for them to be hidden on the back of something in the general vicinity of the feature, it easily could have been under 25 minutes if I hadn’t had to do so much hunting around. This is at least partly because the club was not allowed to create any new fixtures on the common. Thankfully there was no temptation to dive off down the tiny tracks through the undergrowth as we weren’t allowed to map these either! It certainly took me to corners of the common I’ve never been to in our fleeting trips across the area on Tuesday nights in the winter. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, maps can be purchased from the Hawthorns Wildlife Centre down in the south-east corner of the common (which proved a pleasant enough location for a simple lunch).

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744We spent the bank holiday weekend with Christine’s parents (and assorted other orienteering members of the family) notionally to attend the Triple O Severn event in the Forest of Dean. The assembly area for every day was Speech House which seemed to work well. Saturday was a regional event on the area that they had chosen to call Mallards Pike (south-east of assembly). The Black course was fairly sparcely populated as anyone running the Elite classes the following day had to do a special middle distance course as the colour-coded courses used part of the area they would compete on.

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742This year’s Oxford-Cambridge Orienteering Varsity Match took place this weekend, a little later than originally scheduled. We went along to the individual event on Saturday held at Epping Forest North West. I had a run on the Mens A course and Christine took Emma round most of the Womens B in the running buggy. I was over 10 minutes slower than the winner, Mark Bown. I’ll put some of it down to helping Christine with the buggy on the way to number one and number two being in the wrong place. As a result of which, the splits show that I was already five minutes down on Mark when I left the second control.

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It was the first round of the CompassSport Cup yesterday with our match being hosted by BADO at Pamber Forest (in the vicinity of Aldermaston). Christine retired from her run due to odd,baby related, pulls. I had a pretty decent run for once. My splits graph shows a sudden increase in speed from leg 7 onwards which is where I first sighted Ralph Street. In my defence, that was all it was, a sighting, and I didn’t see him again until 11 and then not again until 18. In fact, it was only from 20 onwards where I was actually chasing him (no chance of catching I’m afraid). I was fifth in the results but still over 5 minutes down on Dave Rollins who must have been flying. Emma managed to bring up the rear on the string course again but at least she was getting round under her own steam this time! Sadly (or not depending on your thoughts on travelling to Leicestershire for the final) SOC lost out narrowly to TVOC with SLOW having a clear win.