A good turnout of 5 teams after the aborted attempt in March made it a much better proposition. Despite a huge dumping of rain the previous day, the Friday was perfect conditions. The evening was run as 4 2-legged hunts of varying difficulty.
Apologies to all teams for neglecting to mention the 1st hunt was a 2-legger, but we were consistent and didn’t tell anyone till they’d found the 1st leg. The 1st leg was near a bike path with the potential entrance cunningly disguised by an unknown parked fox vehicle. Most teams had little difficulty with this one, VR blitzing the field a full 6 minutes ahead of BLN. The 2nd leg had a bit of a problem with signal strength. Teams were assisted with some extra transmissions from a handheld. This was found to be mainly due to a bad fox antenna connector, and in retrospect not the fault of the super-duper new Cyclon battery pack afterall. This was all possibly to VR’s disadvantage, so this leg was in fact won by BLI on leg time followed by VR 2nd 5 minutes slower. All teams found this leg within the 10 minutes leg time, despite the long elapsed time.
The 2nd hunt must have been easier with the first leg atop a metal stairway adjoining Churchill Park and then off a closed road. A different 2nd fox was used since we hadn’t at this stage worked out what was wrong with the WIA one, but this one provided it’s own challenges for the bicycle bound fox operator. VR took out the 1st leg narrowly from TXO, BLN and YDF who all found it within the 1st minute. The 2nd leg was won by YDF on leg time due to the faster sprinter, followed closely by BLI (aren’t those leg times deceptive !), then the rest spread out up to 5 minutes.
The 3rd hunt provided the major challenge for the evening with longer distances and trickier to get to locations. YDF had no problems finding the fox near a creek under a major freeway function, but since he drew the orienteering map in the area that’s not a big surprise. VR also did well despite Roger falling into a hole, but the only other team to find us before the 10 minutes was BLN sneaking in with a 9 (Don’t run too far up the hill Marta!… come back come back Marta!). The 2nd leg was again under the freeway a long long way from the 1st leg. BLN did best on leg time followed by VR. A surprise that TXO did well with a 3 despite not finding the 1st leg and still seen running about after fox 1 had left the scene ! All teams found the 2nd leg in time.
Hunt 4 was really one hunt dressed up as 2 to make it a little more interesting. The first leg was one side of a lake, the 2nd the other. The leg 1 planned location got driven out by automatic sprinklers choosing that time to creep closer, but despite that it still took the teams some time to find. VR (again) blitzed the 1st leg, but luckily the leg time system seem to work against them and they rarely win the 2nd leg which was taken out by YDF, who won by running (the team had driven there quicker, but since they drove through marked private property we had to insist they come in another way. All teams found the 2nd leg within 2 minutes of YDF’s time.
The final scores are therefore:
VR 12 (0,5,0,4,1,1,0,1)
YDF 26 (8,9,1,0,0,4,4,0)
BLN 31 (6,7,1,3,9,0,3,2)
BLI 36 (9,0,4,1,10,7,3,2)
TXO 41 (10,8,1,5,10,3,3,1)