My first bush event for 6 months … I expected to be a little rusty.  But the map was not complex or technical, the weather was incredible, and I was set for a good day, hoping to be around my 2.8 km course in 60-70 minutes allowing for a couple of wobbles along the way.

I headed off confidently from the start on what I thought was the right line. The contours matched as I climbed gently through the fairly open forest.  I was looking for a saddle with a track at 90 degrees, then all I had to do was descend a bit and find a small gully on my right.  Easy, right?  Sure enough I found the saddle and the track, and headed downhill.  It took a while to spot the flag, and it seemed further down than the map showed.  Of course it was – it wasn’t my control!  What went wrong?

As I returned to the saddle, I noticed a second track.  A check of the map showed that I was about 100m right of where I thought I was, in another saddle.  Classic parallel error.  I soon put that right, found the control, and shrugged off the mistake, determined to complete the rest of the course error-free.  Well that lasted for only a few minutes – while attempting to get out onto a track, I thrashed around in vegetation for what seemed ages.  When I finally emerged, the track was running in the wrong direction, and I had to study the map for a full minute to figure out where I was. Damn!  More time wasted, but I quickly headed off in the right direction.

“Look for a small track on the right, climb the low hill, then attack from the right hand track bend” said the sensible voice in my head.  Only I kept running, never sighting the track, but climbing the hill and blithely continuing past the bend, only pulling up when confronted by a T junction.  What the … !  I quickly relocated and found the flag, buried in a shallow gully surrounded by more scrappy thick stuff.  It was becoming obvious that I needed to take more care.

Happily I got no 3 right, navigating down a broad spur into an unmissable watercourse, only a few metres north of the flag.  Yay! Back on track.  There were two ways to approach no 4, which was a tree root mound on a hillside (what we call a “bingo” control).  The direct approach clearly wasn’t going to work here as there was no attack point to speak of, so I took another track with a clear jumpoff point not too far from the control.  Follow my line due west, pass another tree root mound – that one there. Or is it?  Are they all mapped? Damn!

Needless to say, I could not find the TRM that I needed.  I circled it without spotting the control, went down the hill, and attacked again from underneath.  I finally found it on my third go. GRRR.  The flag and the feature were both barely visible amongst the undergrowth.

By now I’d switched to survival mode.  I contemplated chucking it in, but decided to stick at it – after all the weather was superb and I didn’t have any need to get back early (other than pride and dignity).  So off I trudged to no 5.  The intervening terrain was nondescript and I decided my best approach was from the track behind the control – that way I didn’t need to bother reading the vague gullies along the way, just hit the track and bounce back in.  It worked, but of course it wasn’t the quickest way to do it.

Control 6 was another of my rare good legs – straight there, no error.  Three to go … No 7 needed a strong attack point, so ignoring the red line, I headed to a track junction, crossed a sharp gully, over a low spur, and (theoretically) into the next gully where the flag would be … only it wasn’t.  Perplexed, I stopped and looked around.  Someone else on my course was higher up the slope, standing still, as if punching.  Could it be?  Yes, there was pink tape on a tree.  It was indeed my no 7, but definitely not in the right place.  Later we heard many sad stories from people who spent ages looking for it.  I was actually one of the luckier ones!

Again I thrashed around in veg, when I was supposed to be on a nice clear track heading for the last two controls.  Eventually I popped out, spent another age working out where I was, and ran for home via two trackside controls, and the Finish.

I slunk into the Finish tent and downloaded in desultory fashion.  They gave me a printout of my result to post on the board.  I contemplated binning it and pretending I never went out.  You can imagine my surprise when it was the fastest time so far!  Every so often I checked back, but no-one on the course was quicker, not even the Men.  I won Course 6!  Only by virtue of being the Least Worst.  It’s not very often you can make 30 minutes of mistakes, and still win.  Which just goes to show, in the spirit of Steven Bradbury at the Winter Olympics – never give up, because you never know when everyone else is having an even worse day than you are!