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| September 2004 |
Fine conditions for last Friday night, but a spate of high rainfall a week before led to some potentially sticky situations.
YQN was the fox for the night with a adventurous plan of 10 hunts treated as 5 double-leggers. Of course we didn’t make it. All but 3 of the locations were surveyed the night before, since I only returned from the World ARDF champs overseas late Tuesday night.
Two fox cars were used to keep things moving along.
A lower turnout of only 4 teams: YDF, BLN (but with a large part of TKQ thrown in), VT and MZ teams.
All hunts were 2 legs on 2m, scored on leg time (which can produce some surprising and unexpected results for the second leg).
Hunt 1A was behind the atmospheric profiller (so thats what that funny noise was ?!) in a water retarding basin behind Tele-IP. Two teams arrived via dubious private property transversal in the brick plant, but in this case the fox decided to turn a blind eye (but don’t be fooled guys…we saw you).
Winner was Josh from the BLN(?) team followed about 5 minutes later by the rest.
Hunt 1B was atop a multi-storey carpark in Dandenong. This was a location we’d left un-used from a previous YQN foxhunt, but that didn’t detract from its effectiveness. Particularly annoying for the teams was the 2m clearance !
Everyone had to run up (but the MZ team is to be congratulated for taking their gear off the roof and driving up !). First was Adam YDF, followed by David from BLN who was led somewhat astray by Adam pretending he was still looking. Have to say it worked a treat. MZ on leg time just before stumps and VT, though finding the fox, still scored a 10. MZ wanted some compensation for not knowing it was a double legged hunt (fair point), but really that’s no excuse for not taking a handheld out sniffing 🙂 Geoff could of course have asked the fox vehicle to relay a message to his team…..
Hunt 2A was another YQN left-over not far from the last hunt, but in a very difficult-to-get-to-unless-you-knew-how-to no-mans land near a railway line.
Roger would have been impressed. Further complicated by the fact the antenna was cast off into the blackberry covered ditch.
Hunt 2B was in a seemingly simply spot at the end of a no through road, but the road was muddy and only the fox actually drove to the end (go Suby!).
Geoff from the MZ team chose an interesting approach which involved some swimming. Unfortunately this took their team out for the rest of the night (wimp), despite the fact they did score a respectable 8 on leg time for this one. YDF again won this one coming in the correct way. BLN got 2 and VT 4.
Hunt 3A was again beside a railway line (Roger where were you?!) in a very hard to get onto track next to the railway (in fact, a quick way to get there would have been to run from the last meeting spot at a railway station!). YDF again 1st, but very closely followed by VT, then later BLN. Down to 3 teams now.
Hunt 3B was in Sweeney Reserve, accessed from a long track still under construction. The original location was going to be behind the footy club, but this was occupied on Friday night so we chose a nearby shelter instead.
Adam from YDF ran from the car, but BLN ran in from somewhere further afield.
VT did find the fox but scored 10 on leg time (sorry guys).
We were planning on making 4A actually into former 4B and 4B into unused 5A to cut things shorter. When we attempted to communicate this to the other fox vehicle though he was already in location in original 4A, so it was easier to leave it be. Off the end of a brand new court atop a hill outside Berwick.
4B was the nastiest hunt of the night (sorry to spring this on you last hunt – just the way things happened!), in a tea-tree forest beside an Equestrian trail. VT pulled out at this stage after not finding 4A despite leaving it on for 25 mins after YDF found it, so we’re down to 2 teams. YDF found it only 1 minute ahead of BLN on leg time but considerably earlier in real-time. Both teams didn’t come in the easy way the fox did, but had an massive adventure crossing uncrossable rivers on dodgy fallen trees after running many kilometres. Oh well. It wasn’t meant to be easy, but not quite *that* hard !
This hunt was declared the supper hunt and all remaining departed for Steve & Nathan’s place. One got lost on the way but eventually made it.
The following scores were announced (all complaints will be fed into Steve’s scoring program lost in an unreasoning loop ):
YDF is fox next month.
Team |
1A |
1B |
2A |
2B |
3A |
3B |
4A |
4B |
Total |
Place |
YDF |
5 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
5 |
1 |
BLN |
0 |
9 |
7 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
10 |
1 |
32 |
2 |
VT |
4 |
10 |
5 |
4 |
1 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
54 |
3 |
MZ |
4 |
9 |
6 |
8 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
67 |
4 |
Cheers,
Bruce