SOG Local Event: Monks’ Forest near Balcombe
It has been ages since I went orienteering (or had much of a training run) and it showed!
It was a glorious morning with bright sunshine and real warmth. The first part of the course took us through open woodland carpeted with bluebells. There is nothing more wonderful in nature than a southern English bluebell wood in May. The planner encouraged us well off the paths to enjoy it more and it was a privilege to be there. The woods were very wet from recent rain, which made the first few controls a little tricky: what the map showed as wet ditches were rushing streams and there were lots of places to be caught in mud. At one point I managed to go knee-deep (literally) into a marsh which was marked on the map but not very visible on the ground.
I made two huge errors both for the same reason. Going to control six, I chose the optimum route to control 11. My eye caught the circle on the map and I was fixed. I had to go from finding 11 (which was not easy from that direction) to six. I did a very similar thing at control 14. I left control 13, but read the map as if I was going from 12 to 14 – I managed to convince myself that the ground agreed with the map until, after quite a long way, I could not pretend any more and had to backtrack because I could not remember if I had visited control 13. Just lack of concentration but these two errors cost me over 20 minutes.
Thankfully, the terrain slowed everyone down, and my performance did not look quite as disastrous as it really was. I was 21st, but was beaten by all the “usual suspects”.
I thought the course was very good. There was a huge variety of terrain and you had to navigate every step – shame I could not keep my head together.