orienteering (Wirra Wirra) 1:30:00 [3]
shoes: Inov8 Oroc spikes
Left home at 5:30 am in order to get up to Wirra Wirra to put out controls as soon as it was light enough to see in the (low-vis, gloomy, felled-and-replanted about 10 years ago) forest. Coming past Mt Crawford I was mindful to be wary of kangaroos but hadn't expected to see a family of them having a picnic in the middle of the road and seeming quite annoyed that they'd have to pack up the teacups because I'd come along!
I'd resurrected the club relays courses from 2003, on the rocky, fairly flat, eastern part of Wirra Wirra. We were concerned that in the replanting process the rocks might have been destroyed, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but in most cases the rock was pretty good (allowing for initial mapper's interpretation, which is always a bit tricky with sticking-up slabs of schist) and it was more the clearings which had changed, plus newly-open rocky hillsides which had once been treed. I do love this map and am glad that it can be useable again, although it took me a while to be sure of where I was in many places, and after about 90 min I had only put out 2/3 of my intended controls but the others were waiting for me and so I headed back and told them apologetically they'd have to find the first and last controls by themselves.
Decent sized group today: Bridget & Simon, Robin & Adrian, AK, Angus, Nic, and even Fern & Tyson (who took it in turns to orienteer and entertain Paddy). I ended up 'shadowing' Andrew around a 5ish km course with some stops for communal map interpretation, and afterwards I took him to the north end of the map to collect the controls he hadn't been to, which were in the nicest part of the forest. I owe B&S and Tyson for control collecting, too :)
Also I spent the afternoon at Belair with Nic and Lachy walking around and taping all the control sites for the sprint event which they are setting in 2 weeks' time. Courses should be pretty good, and now I am completely stuffed.