W. Cape Orienteering Festival Day 1

The first day of the Western Cape Orienteering Festival took place at Royston Farm, where I did the run-mtb-run event two weeks ago. Still, orienteering navigation is very different to Google Earth map navigation so I knew the course would be challenging.

Overall, my nav was OK, but I did make a few less desirable choices. I wasn't particularly focused, for whatever reason, and it showed as a non-competitive run. 

These are the odd things that I did:

Control 3

I came in a bit low to #2 and then not wanting to chance the green vegetation, I ran around. At 3, I first went in from a bend in the path and didn't find the control where I thought it should be. Shock and horror. 

I went back to the path and ran around a bit more - the control was visible from the path.

Control 3 to 4

The easy route was to run on the trail that runs parallel to the road (yellow). I cycled this two weeks ago. So I decided to rather take the trails. This was definitely slower, but was new terrain for me to discover and demanded that I pay attention to the map.

Control 5

Approaching 5, my first thought was to go from the corner of the road, but then I decided to rather get closer by taking a bearing from the bend in the path.

I suspect that I didn't go far enough before starting to look for the control when I didn't see it where I thought it should be (thicket). I looked around for a bit and then took myself back to the road and the corner, took a bearing and I walked straight to it. 

My Strava track shows that I may have even passed it nearby. 

From this, it looks like I wasn't quite at the bend and that I went in too soon... But this is probably a map-track offset as it doesn't show me coming along right on the road, from the right, which I did. 

Control 7

For the route to 7, the fastest would have been to take the trail that I'd come up on (yellow) but instead I took the zig-zaggy trail. It worked fine but was definitely less efficient. 

And that was it. Moving slower, being way too chilled and these errors cost me. 

Hilton finished 22 minutes faster than me and Jacori 10 minutes. 

I'll really need to focus on the long event on Saturday.