Kangaroos' Tales - April 2014

Saturday, 3 May 2014

From the Editor

Kangaroos Tales will now hop into your email inbox on a monthly basis. It is a review of some of our activities in the preceding month. Written items (unformatted text) and photographs (captioned) are most welcome. Please send by email to Dennis Mews, by the end of the month.

April has seen a very successful Easter Orienteering Carnival in New South Wales, as well as the first of the ever-popular MelBushO events at Woodlands Park.

Dennis Mews - Editor

President's Piece

We have had a very positive response to the new BK Bulletin. If members can get used to sending in anecdotes, stories, photos, or anything relevant to our activities, we will have a very good vehicle to keep members up to date.

Cheers
John Sheahan
President of Bayside Kangaroos Orienteering Club

Here is the BK finish split handicap results for the 4 Easter days.

The finish chute was remarkably consistant over each of the 3 main competition days, with many members recording exactly the same split on two day. The ultimate prize for consistancy though has to go to Dennis Mews, who managed exactly 31s for each of the 3 days !

Congratulations are also in order for Janet King and Anne Robinson, who somehow contrived to appear in the handicap results every day, with Anne even winning twice. This implies performance well above their previous record; but the averages will have to catch up to them in time.

The outright benchmarks, on which everyone's multipliers are applied, have been set most consistently by Peter Collins, with Nicholas and yours truly making an occasional appearance (possibly spurred on by the extra incentive of a Sledge class finish split). Note that Peter appears in both outright and handicap on three of the days, with Nicholas and myself only managing that feat on one day each.

I have also started yearly cummulative scores for the Handicap and Outright BK finish split champions for 2014.

The rankings so far, after the Easter carnival are:

Thai and Laos, Jan-Feb 2014

by Ian Baker

I left Melbourne on Wednesday 29 January, flying nine hours to Bangkok.

Not caring to stand in queues with the common rabble, I’d pre-booked Suvarnabhumi airport FastTrack service for about one thousand THB.

The man with a sign with my name met me as I came off the plane and escorted me through Immigration and baggage collection; I was on my way downstairs to the express train station within fifteen minutes; the train is 90 THB/25km/15 minutes to the city station from where I took a taxi the short ride to the President Palace Hotel.

Next morning I had a dental appointment; Bangkok prices are about a third of Oz; equipment and service is excellent. Rebuild a crack in a tooth, clean and checkup cost 2400 THB. Then I went to the hairdresser for an overdue cut and pedicure, 500 THB plus 100 tip.

I’d booked two different group bike tours; the package is bike hire, leader, good hotels and three meals a day, back-up van which carries the suitcases and meets the group at intervals with fresh water and fruit snacks.
 
To read on, download Ian's complete article, including photos.

Easter Orienteering 2014

A long-awaited trip to New South Wales for Easter weekend means three forest events in three days. Much excitement after a diet of street events through the long hot summer.

We arrived at Carwell's Labyrinth on Saturday and prepared to compete. Leg protection and sun protection applied, despite start times before 10am.

I set off with confidence to my first control, checking the compass on the way, only to find myself off-course and needing to relocate on the rocks below. Three minutes lost already!

All went well after this to halfway round the course. I decided on taking the direct route between 10 and 11, which proved to be steep, rocky and difficult, culminating in a miss at the termite mound. Another two minutes lost.

I normally like these hi-viz termite mounds, we could certainly do with some to aid our navigation in Victoria, although NSW can keep the termites.
 
To read more and see the map, go to Dennis's blog.
 
Easter 2014 results, with splits, can be found here.

A delicious pasta meal and BK Social at Easter in Mudgee, NSW

MelBushO - Under The Flightpath

MelBushO season is here again, the first event being a 45 minute trip to the airport and the gentle slopes of Woodlands Park. If you get lost, look up and head for the roar of the jet engines. Sundays seem as busy as ever – is nothing sacred?

We navigate to orienteering registration and then retreat to prepare for action, Pat on the C course, me on the B. Paul tries to shame me onto the A course but I resist. He was right of course. These events are designed to be simple for newcomers and organisers. I will appreciate this in June when it is my turn to produce an event.
 
To read more and see the map, go to Dennis's blog.
 
Results can be found here.

1492 and beyond

by Mike Hubbert

The year 1492 was an auspicious one for navigators, even though the navigator in question – Christopher Columbus – found the wrong control. But he did come back with some major map corrections which gave him a pretty good excuse for mispunching.

Though some say that the Vikings were there several hundred years before him. Did Columbus just misread their map, veer off course and discover the Caribbean instead?
In Melbourne’s Park & Street competitions, Mike Hubbert reached 1492 Millennium points at the Springthorpe event on 31st Oct 2013. Mike said “Reaching 1492 is a quite satisfying benchmark. I was in Barcelona on business some time ago staying at the Hotel Colon, a name which created a trifle amount of concern. But one evening I wandered down to the waterfront and found a giant statue of a man gazing out to sea. The man was Christophe Colon and I realised that Colon was Catalan for Columbus. So I saw the hotel in a different light.”

Mike has continued to gain Millennium points, reaching 1500 on 16th November (and a nice bottle of bubbly for being the first to achieve this milestone). Then on December 11th at Kerrimuir, 1512 points – the birth year of Gerardus Mercator of the Mercator Projection map fame. Mike says his next goal is 1569, the year Mercator first published his map of the world showing the style of his new projection which later took his name. He hopes to reach that mark some time late in May. On the way he will pass 1564, the year Galileo was born.

Though Millennium points only count events completed in this millennium, in the 45 years that Mike has been taking part in Orienteering events he has chalked up over 3760 events and located more than 48,600 controls. And there’s probably quite a few more out there just waiting to be found.

This Month's Video
 
Easter 2014 - New South Wales
 A very good video, including aerial shots, has been made of the Easter Monday event at Prosser's Reef, which gives a flavour of the weekend.
 
Click here to see it.