O-a-blog™ (HH, Ashridge South)

Saturday, 2 February 2008

Yesterday I went to a very nice Happy Herts event at the National Trust's very fine Ashridge Estate. It's always a pleasure to orienteer here in these beautiful, amazingly English woods. Great course and organization too.

I did Green. I had a couple of stupid moments and of course was not fast (I really need to do some work on my fitness), but in general I thought I navigated quite well - I was pleased with the number of times I did something slightly the shorter-but-harder way and it actually worked. Possibly my pace-counting and compass work is improving a little with practice - or maybe I just got lucky. But it was certainly nice to be occasionally able to follow it ought to be here somewhere with ah yes, here it is. I think it helped that the woods are so open - your chances of being able to follow a bearing are so much better when you are not getting pushed offline by undergrowth the whole time and you can just choose a point and follow it.

Control 4 on the map extract is an example of this - it's from RouteGadget so the red line is me. I didn't really know what to do other than just take a bearing from the path then count paces, and to my amazement it worked. Woohoo.

It was a beautiful day, and having finished the course I went and had coffee at the very nice snack bar by the NT carpark. This was a lovely place to sit for a few minutes and I chatted to Oscar, a miniature Schnauzer, and his family.

Results: pleasingly, I came not much further than half way down the order, which makes a change at the moment. Onwards and upwards! (Or not.)