Friday the 20th July saw the Melbourne monthly foxhunt run. The Weather was cool with no wind and occasional misty rain. The start was the 24Hr carpark at Braeside park which was walking distance from the supper location so as teams could leave cars at supper while they were hunting.
The first hunt started at 8:15 and was only 800m away behind a factory in Braeside. There was plenty of signal which appeared to confuse a few teams as only 2 out of 5 got in on the hunt. YDF was first followed 5 minutes later by PW.
The second hunt was a two legged beastie with the first leg run by Geoff and John. The fox was in a dead end street near the Frankston Fwy which caused many a team to go past and have to work there way back through side streets. The second leg was in Langwarrin on top of some old cricket nets at the back of a park. More than half the teams didn’t manage to look up and spent several minutes chasing reflections off the wire fence. Scoring for this hunt was done on placing’s with YDF coming first followed by BLN and PW
The 3rd event was quite some distance south to get the hounds into virgin territory. The fox said he had used both tanks of the Prado to get there but I’m sure the spinning of the wheels on the slippery track had something to do with it. The 160W linear was used (backed off to 100W by the voltage drop) to get enough signal to the hounds. First to the fox was YDF who managed to put the gate back so as it looked closed and locked. this didn’t fool ZPF though who came second with BLN taking 3rd.
The next event was in a court on a hill in Frankston. This split the teams up a little with YDF first and YQN and PW 5 minutes later. I think this is where BLN may have had gear problems as they somehow managed to end up in Frankston.
The 5th event was again near the Frankston Freeway and once again you needed to come of the Freeway early to get in quickly. This was a hunt the car and sniff the hidden fox hunt. YDF had no problems with this being a good 6 minutes ahead of PW and ZPF teams.
The fox became slack on the supper hunt and ran the event from the car under a street light in a new housing estate. This was an easy hunt to get the teams to supper early with YDF just beating YQN, ZPF and PW on one point.
Somehow YDF managed to get a perfect score of 0 to come first for the night, well ahead of PW on 24 and ZPF on 34. YQN had a lapse in form without TJN and managed 4th place on 42 points just ahead of BLN without XAJ on 44. The YDF team have somehow manipulated the competition so as that when they are away next month ARDFing the will still score 3 point to the overall by being fox for the night.