Today’s terrain was pretty much a repeat of the other two days, except it was less open, and scrappier scrub with smaller rock.  Everything was vague.  Vague contours, vague tracks that blended with the general sandy ground, vague fences that might or might not be standing, and vague vegetation boundaries where yellow gently graduated into white.  And we were all feeling vague, after 3 days of intense heat.  Although it was theoretically 10 degrees cooler, the sun was still quite fierce.  My legs were feeling the effort, and so was my brain.  Having abandoned any hope of a place (unless at least 5 people mispunched), I decided just to navigate as cleanly as possible.  Huh.

Yesterday I bundled most of my errors into one leg.  Today I was far more democratic, spreading them across 5 legs of 11.  It started well enough, following a fence line, across an open field, up a scrabbly slope into some nondescript rock, turn right, and there it was.  Control 2 looked pretty straightforward – follow a track through a fence gap, nothing much more to it. Except that there was more than one track, and more than one fence gap, and lots of people milling about looking bemused.  I soon found out why. Checking my bearing, the track I was on was 90 degrees out.  I retreated to the last point of certainty, and started again. 

Control 3 was OK, but I ended up well north of control 4, after taking what I thought was care.  Correction was reasonably quick, but I realised it was going to be one of those days.   And so it proved to be.  I navigated to my 5^th control by finding my 8^th (I had 4 controls in a small loop).  Then I had a “run” of accuracy, managing to locate 6, 7, and back to 8, error free.  My ratio of bad to good was improving – but not for long. 

Control 9 rang warning bells.  If I thought the terrain was vague up to this point, it just got worse.  There was nothing to go by other than a compass bearing and a generally upward sloping contour, through piles of low rocks and lots of scrubby veg – no attack point or catching feature to speak of.  I was supposed to be identifying a clearing, but there was nothing that leapt out at me as such.  At this point I was on my own, and starting to worry that I’d really gone wrong.  Suddenly, several other people arrived, and we all started the hunt together – reassuringly, I wasn’t the only one having trouble.  Someone found it, not far from where I’d originally been.

Now I was on to my bogey leg – the second last.  This involved a longish descent down to a watercourse, which became steepish towards the end.  Sticking to a bearing was nigh impossible, so I just found a way down and figured I’d work it out when I hit the watercourse at the bottom.  Lots of other people were doing the same thing, and everyone seemed to be turning right and crossing to the other bank; I did the same, and made my way along a rock-strewn track to my control. Only of course, it wasn’t my control.  The Curse had struck again.  I slunk off back the way I’d come, in the right direction, to find my control sitting innocently smack bang in the watercourse, plain as the nose on your face. 

At least the final control was simple.  My time ended up almost the same as yesterday, and I reckoned I’d faffed for about the same amount of time overall, but on legs 2, 4, 5, 9 and 10.  Oh well, I stuck at it on all three days, didn’t record a mispunch, and I have an Easter result.  Even if it’s at the bottom of the list (8^th I think; for some reason, they seem unable to publish overall results).

Post race discussions demonstrated a similar vagueness experienced by almost everyone; we agreed today was the hardest of the three days, and no-one was happy with their navigation.  So no bling for us, but we can all hold our heads up high, having survived. Tomorrow – the long drive home.