orienteering race (Fettucini-ing) 1:02:33 [3] 4.8 km (13:02 / km)
shoes: Asics Trabuco
On first thoughts, it seemed a bit silly to go run around Kooyoora in the middle of October. On second thoughts, I had enough frequent flyer points for a day trip to Melbourne, and could scavenge a lift with Blair, who unfortunately turned out to be broken :( but was an excellent chauffeur, touring some parts of the countryside I hadn't seen before and complying with my requests to stop at bakeries!
It was definitely rather warm in the middle of the day and so I opted for the 4.8km course, of which I proceeded to make a right mess. I'd like to say my compass wasn't settling very well but it's more probable that I wasn't reading it properly. Also I wasn't taking enough note of the 1:7500 scale.
So I overran the second control significantly before correcting and looping back into it from the north, losing 3-4 min, and Clare Baker passed me there. I could see her in the distance on the next downhill leg which was quite green and required a lot of picking one's way through crap; unfortunately I didn't pay enough attention to how far downhill I had gone so stopped short when the gully flattened out, not realising that I had to go below one more line of rock, and although I fairly soon worked out that I was too high, stood on top of a rock for a while trying to make things fit before deciding that it didn't matter where I was because where I needed to be was further down.
So I trotted downhill, still hearing Clare and some green having an altercation off to my left, and worked out the rest of that leg okay although now the scale seemed such that features took forever to come up. The next leg should have been SW up a watercourse, which looked rather green so I intended to take a gully branching off to the right. I crossed the watercourse and headed uphill, reassured by keeping it on my left although none of the rocks I was passing seemed to fit anything on my map. Checked my compass a couple of times and if the bearing was trying to push me a bit further left, I reassured myself that it was okay because I didn't want to be right in the creek bottom.
Then I hit a road...what the? In flabbergasted disbelief I identified it as the road to the north of my previous control. WTF? Seems that I had crossed the watercourse below a junction and followed a branch and then a gully which ran NW not SW, thereby forfeiting all my rights to call myself a competent orienteer. Shamefacedly I turned my compass to the south and plodded along watching the needle verrry carefully to 4 then repeated 50% of that leg in the reverse direction back to 5, and was comparatively competent although ridiculously slow through the remaining 3 controls of the course, even having time to admire the little white everlasting daisies which carpeted the open spaces.
On third thoughts, it's not so much the map which beat me as my own compass-work or lack thereof. Certainly my bearings were much better on the foggy day in July, and Jenny Bourne did 53 min today; I should at least have been able to match that; reckon I chucked away at least 12 min. Oh well, it was still a fun day out and the bunch of native flowers which I bought at the Trentham markets for George's birthday tomorrow survived until I got home at 8pm and gave them to him :)