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Sunday, 28 February 2021
A windy but fine morning saw 65 people competing at the first NavDash of the year, starting in the pleasant grounds of the Gosnells Civic Centre and moving out to the riverside bushland of Centennial Pioneer Park and briefly into the Gosnells shopping area.
The nature of the area and the short time-frame available for planning meant there was limited scope for map updates and subtlety in course planning. In any case, the map offers few opportunities for detailed navigation challenges and intricate control sites so the Hard courses focused on providing multiple route choices. There was only one leg where a hasty route choice could cause a major time loss.
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A tRicky event!
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Sunday, 21 February 2021
Today's event at the Perth Waldorf School was to be my final at setting in WA and I was ever so pleased that the school allowed us access. I had mapped the school in July last year and it was so very complex that I needed two field trips to get everything right and even then I found errors when out course checking (and sadly more when putting out controls but nothing major so I had hoped no-one would notice). The natural bush setting (and the occasional quenda or rabbit sighting) added to the atmosphere.
I thought I'd do something special for such a compact and complex school so the two short courses required a map flip with the long course needing a flip, an exchange and then another flip! The idea of the long course was for the first two maps to have long route choice legs then after getting participants familiar with the school, bouncing them around short legs requiring constant direction changes, with bonus route choice to mix it up every so often. This worked well and runners needed to keep constant map contact with the 1:1500 scale meaning it was easy to overshoot things.
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A tRicky event!
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Saturday, 06 February 2021
tRicky had been preparing for the Claisebrook event for quite some time, being a new and very complex map (for a Metro event) there were a lot of decisions to make about CP locations, probable pedestrian traffic and a number of busy roads through the map causing OOB headaches. As it turned out there were more important issues to deal with such as a possible cricket final on the same night (avoided), then the lockdown (ended the day prior) and finally the remnants of a tropical cyclone passing through on event day.
The aim of this event was to set a compact course that allowed as much route choice as possible between controls more so than deciding which ones to collect (though the order was still a factor) but with a lot of detail to take in with the many paths through OOB areas near the start, parkland and waterways to negotiate. The long course headed into 'easier' detail in the north but again with macro route choice between almost every control.
Thankfully the weather didn't deter the 70+ participants at the event but it did keep the casual pedestrians away so a bonus. The rain was minimal and kept it cool (something that hasn't happened a whole lot at earlier season events) and participants seemed happy with the tRicky courses set, which will most likely be his final MetrO event before relocating to Melbourne where the weather is much more predictable.
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