The December hunts tends to be a bit unusual, deliberately planned for a short night. It’s a good opportunity to try some novel ideas.
This time, the CI team had a street orienteering map with many good fox hidey holes all in the one area, so instead of drip feeding the hunts out over years, we decided to put all the foxes out at once. What started out as a 5 TX concept grew out to the standard 10 frequencies, to add more choices, tradeoffs & hard decisions to make. Strategy!
There were 10 transmitters, all on the Mt Gambier mode frequencies, for ease of sniffing.
However, the hunt differed somewhat from the Mt Gambier sniffer hunt:
- The TXs were were different point values, ranging from 1-7 points
- A combination of car and running were envisaged to get the best result
- Points were set not only on distance from the start, but difficulty in getting to the TX. The two highest scoring 7 pointers were relatively close to the start.
- Scoring based on a Score event format with a 1 hour time limit (with late penalties). Order into a TX was irrelevant.
Teams took varying strategies to cope with all this information. Just getting the maximum number of TXs did not guarantee the best score; in fact, prior to late penalties, the best scoring team, FOX, only found 5 TXs but with 23pts. FAST found 6, but scored 21. However, FOX would have been better giving up after only 4 TXs, scoring 19 pts, instead of a whopping 7 pt late penalty hit, moving them from 2nd to 3rd on 16pts. MD only found 3, but remarkably ended up in 2nd with 18 pts, only 28s late (1 pt off). OW threw away more than half of their points in penalties. Despite being accused of “sending them out again”, the fox did no such thing, only telling them they were 10mins early; did they want to finish early?. The decision to head out again was theirs entirely!
| Team | TX #s found | Score | Score with late | Fox Score |
| FAST | 2,5,7,8,9,10 | 21 | 21 | 19 |
| MD | 4,5,6 | 19 | 18 | 22 |
| FOX | 2,3,5,7,8 | 23 | 16 | 24 |
| OW | 2,9,10 | 9 | 4 | 36 |
Here’s the Fox-eyes-only map (you can figure out TX# from frequency noted):
Can you spot the error?
E was further in along the creek.
The only TX not found by any team was H on 144.000 (#1) . I could hear it from the start, so it was certainly running, but with only 2pts maybe wasn’t worth the effort.
Since the TXs are all programmed up this way, the ARDF Christmas hunt might be a smaller, on-foot variant on the same theme. Perhaps with an extra twist?
Hunt 2
Hunt 2 was are more traditional two legged vehicle based hunt. OW and FAST decided to not trouble the 1st leg fox, and in fact OW elected to not get in on either leg, preferring instead the other side of the creek. We had to start the two missing teams 2nd leg times based on when the 1st fox was turned off. This could give them up to a couple of minutes advantage on the 2nd leg, depending on where they are located at the time, but missing the 1st leg is hardly a winning strategy!
FOX won both legs convincingly.
Supper Hunt
Park not far from the Supper location, carefully set to encourage teams to entert supper from the correct entrance. All teams found this fox, with FAST taking the honours, with MD right after.
Many thanks to Olga for laying on the banquet supper.
Scores
| Hunt/Team | FOX | OW | FAST | MD |
| 1 | 24 | 36 | 19 | 22 |
| 2A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 6 |
| 2B | 0 | 10 | 5 | 9 |
| Supper | 5 | 8 | 0 | 1 |
| Final Score | 29 | 64 | 34 | 38 |
| Place | 1 | 4 | 2 | 3 |