Last night the news was full of dire predictions of gales and torrential downpours as Cyclone Cook was to make landfall somewhere along the east coast.  We woke up to bright sunshine, clear skies, and not a puff of wind.  Probably just as well.  If I was the organiser of today’s Oceania Sprint, I would have been going out of my brain with stress, lying in bed wide awake imagining all my carefully positioned infrastructure blowing away, never to be seen again.

Luckily there were no worries on that front, and the worst thing we had to deal with was mud – the arena was a complete quagmire.  There were plenty of paved areas to set up our candy pink chairs, which were visible from several kilometres away.

I had a late start, and showers blew in while I was queued up at pre-start.  I copped several drenchings on the way round, and there were a lot of slippery sections on the course that I slowed right down for. I set off conservatively for no 1, but miscounted a series of parallel buildings and went one too far south, which wasted a bit of time.  After sorting that out, I set off confidently for no 2, only to run into a set of buildings that made no sense whatsoever.  I had only given my compass a cursory glance, and was 90 degrees out.  I was also over-reading the detail on the map, when in fact all I needed to do was follow the road and find a fence end.  It took me 3 or 4 minutes to work this one out, and by then the damage was well and truly done.  Our next few controls were clustered together, and once I’d done them I was finally into the map.  I was fine for the next few legs, although the slippery conditions were really slowing me down as I saw other people landing on their bums or stomachs.

We had a couple of controls in a vegie patch, which was fun. Those ones caused a bit of trouble for people but I was very clean through there.  After that the course became quite linear and not particularly technical – I think the course setters could have done a bit more in that regard.  It was now a matter of keeping the legs running right up to the finish.  I ended up taking 26 minutes, which was way too long and a bit disappointing – we later starters did have the worst of the conditions, but my errors can only be blamed on me.

Ilze and I have fallen in love with the Channel 1 weatherman – his flourishing hand gestures as he explains the vagaries of the weather are a sight to behold.

Tomorrow’s event is being held in an area full of something called Cutty Grass.  I forgot to pack my suit of armour.