David Currie

18Last night saw a highly successful games night organised by Christine for SOC. The evening started with a game of Bing-O. The twist here was that the usual numbers had been replaced by IOF control description symbols. To make things a bit easier we had earth symbols in the first column, water in the second, rock in the middle, vegetation in the fourth and man-made featues in the last however there was still much frantic searching through the crib sheets provided to each table.

Next up was an exercise we picked up at coaching conference. A map with 20+ controls on it was placed at one end of the room and a blank map at the other and each time had five minutes to copy as many controls from one to the other as they could. We decided to limit each person to copying one control at a time but even that seemed too much for some!

The evening ended with a “New Forest Pony Drive” – a bit like a beetle drive but with Christine’s best attempt at a pony replacing the usual insect.

SOC‘s second street event of the year took place in Chandler’s Ford on a freezing cold evening. Roger Pleasant had drawn up a new map, extending the area to cover a section to the east of the Hiltingbury triangle. With a good spread of controls it was by no means obvious that it was possible to get all of the controls and choosing a route was tricky.

I started off slowly as, the faster I ran, the colder my hands felt! After about half an hour I’d warmed up a bit but had also realised that I wasn’t going to get all of the controls. It involved a bit of a sprint to get back to the King Rufus in time but I just made it with four controls outstanding. Jon Forster picked up one more but forfeited the extra points by being back late.

Had great fun at the Wimborne Orienteers Night Owl event this evening. Moors Valley Country Park has a dense path network so controls were never far from a track. This meant you could sprint most of the time and the only problem with navigation was trying not to overshoot some of the smaller path junctions. Unfortunately I didn’t twig straight away that I should be able to get all of the controls and had to go back for one at the end but still managed all 26 in 53:54.

Setting up the start in the pouring rain wasn’t ideal preparation for my run at this year’s SOC November Classic. The map was named “The Reptile Centre” after the tourist attraction at the northern end. As I set out of the start I new it was going to be a slow run – I could still feel last week’s KIMM in my legs. This was made worse by the brashings littering the forest floor and the mudbaths that passed for paths. I felt the course could have been better as too often I found myself following some obvious line feature in to the control. Consequently, the couple of navigational errors I made were mainly due to tiredness. Still managed 83 minutes for 12.7km which isn’t too sluggish. Unfortunately a trio of touring Scandinavian buses meant that I was well down the results with Mats Troeng clocking in at a mere 63 minutes and his brother not far behind!

At least we had a chance to dry of afterwards with a nice meal at The Oak Inn, Bank with friends. I can recommend the Thai fish cakes!

It was the first SOC street event of the winter tonight. As usual, Richard Jeans had drawn up a map of Lyndhurst with fire hydrants, street lamps and post boxes as controls. I set off North out of the town centre and made the mistake of spending too long picking off the low scoring controls on the way out. My LED Petzl was fading and it was proving difficult to find some of the hydrants in the dark.

I passed Mike Yeo running in the opposite direction after about half an hour. I knew Mike had only been to the controls far out at Bank so decided that I wouldn’t go out there. Instead, I tried to get as many of the medium scoring controls on the outskirts of Lyndhurst. This strategy seemed to pay off and, returning with about a minute to go, I had managed all but six of the controls.