Brown course at Huntington,
Generally a satisfactory outing,, Pretty darned cold, wore hat and gloves. After about 5 minutes I took the thumb compass off because it was freezing my thumb, just held it in my hand.
Map and Route
1. Powerline to top of hill, then straight in, saw the marsh downhill to my right and then knew I was there.
2. Saw Judy ahead when I was leaving 1. She was apparently headed to the right, so I went left. Easy navigation once I was down to the long reentrant, across the marsh at the end, around the cliff, picked up the trail going NE to the manmade object (a chimney) and easy from there. Flag in the middle of a small pond, so got as close as I could.
3. Straight, under the cliff 2/3 of the way there, saw the reentrant opening to my right, and then just up one line to the cliff.
4. W to the trail, around the green, and then stopped looking at the compass and tried to use the walls, but I was off one whole wall to the N. Finally figured it out after a bit of nothing looking right. and corrected back. Probably a good 2 minute error.
5. Good leg. R of the cliff, worked my way across the marshy ground in the vicinity of the intermittent trail, up the notch in the hill and straight in. Nellie and a couple of others were a bit ahead of me there. At that point, I apparently punched the stop button on the watch instead of the lap button, noticed the time, 35:59.
6. Fairly straight, but not as straight as the track shows. A little left to go L of the cliff halfway there and up that little slot. Could see the knoll with the boulder on it that lies 30M in front of the control, so easy from there. When I arrived and punched the split, saw it was still 35:59, so started the watch again, punched a split again. Generally pretty bummed about screwing up the time.
7. S, next to the marsh, below the big hill, but still thinking about the watch mistake. Stopped too soon and went hunting in the cliffs to my R, wandered a bit and then headed S where I saw the flag. Probably squandered a minute and a half. I saw Nellie heading S, thought he was going to the finish, but apparently he had missed it and would need to return.
F Generally SE, intending to hit the marsh and go S to the powerline and in, but there were some dogs near the marsh and I just went across to get away from them and up and over a completely unnecessary hill. Dumb. Anyway, another 2 minutes maybe going over the hill and avoiding easy trail.
Took me a while to hit on the way to recover the lost time segment. I figured it was in the vicinity of 3:30 or so, or maybe 4, but couldn't tease it out of the garmin track in AP, or the .gpx file. When I quick-routed the map, though, QR had it: 3:45. Nice.