Friday, July 27, 2012

Mapping MasterClass with Mr Lotty

Dave followed up last year's fieldwork mapping class with the fieldwork to OCAD class he promised us.  It was a small but knowledge-hungry group that congregated at Coogee on Wednesday evening.  Kev Curby and Graeme Dawson, Helen and Terry and of course the hosting Joneses were there ready to drill Dave with all the irritating bits of OCAD that we had been struggling with on our own. And weren't there plenty?!  Too many frankly to list but Dave did ring afterwards to tell us something which I now write here for all of you intrepid OCAD warriors.

Dave says:If you want to align your scanned map with your OCAD working map go into 'Background map' on the tool bar and choose option 'Adjust map'.  Click a point on the background map that is obvious (a road junction for example) and then click on the same point on the OCAD working map and then press 'enter'.  This should align the maps perfectly.

If you have not scanned your background map with a precise north/south orientation - you're a dope!  However all is not lost - do as above, but click four corners (strictly north/south corners) of the background map and the OCAD working map and then press 'enter'. That should sort it out, but you can repeat the steps over again until you are completely happy with your map alignment.'

If any of that isn't clear, ask Dave.  Many thanks to Dave for his time and expertise.  I'll be twisting his arm again before too long for more of the same.  Right now I'm off to fiddle endlessly with OCAD  - that seemed to be one of the key messages from the evening!

Friday, July 13, 2012

World Orienteering Championships / 14-21 July

WOC 2012 is starting tomorrow in Lausanne, Switzerland with the Sprint qualifications in the morning and the finals in the afternoon (coincidentally a few of us are running in the NSW Sprint Championships out at Richmond). During next week they will hold the middle and long distance qualifications and also finals, and will be finishing off with the relays next Saturday.

I found this interesting statistic on the WOC website (www.woc2012.ch): 
During the WOC 2012, the maps will be once more in the center of attention with 55’000 maps produced for a total cost of CHF 340’000.- (almost ten percent of the budget). This World Championships require the production of 30 different kinds of maps. In total, the area covered by the WOC maps includes 91 km2.

The budget for this WOC is therefore about 3.4 million Swiss Francs (CHF:AUD is about 1:1), incredible !! I believe that the budget for the 2003 WOC in Switzerland was about 1 million CHF!!

World Masters - Bad Harzburg in Germany

WMOC is always a mix of orienteering, socialising and more orienteering. The organisation of WMOC 2012 was very very good. However there was one aspect that amused and annoyed.
There seems to be no relevance between what was printed in the book regarding start procedure and what actually happened. Event 1 we went into the first start box at the given start time. Day 2 you went in a minute early. Day 3 there was an extra 1km tossed into the distance to the start and then on Day 4 we had saw us with an additional  plus an additional 5 minutes added to the start procedure which meant instead of going in at -6minutes you went in at -11. The last day was as expected almost back to normal. Needless to say there was a lot of confusion at the start and a lot of late starters.

Socially it is a chance to catch up with fellow aussies and also competitors from all over the world.

Back to competition.
 The Sprint Qualifier was held in the upper town area of Bad Harzburg. Our accommodation was just a couple of doors down from my 7th and 8th controls and the park in the centre of the courses was one we walked through every day to get to the eateries and the magnificent Bakeri's.. So it felt like home and really was quite straight forward. Mind you in the park there were so many controls it was easy to come unstuck. Unfortunately for Maureen a lapse in concentration meant a mp and thus the final was  a non competitive run. The area was used was very scenic. Alas not all control sites were great. A gap between a set of stairs and a wall may have seem like a good idea. The problem was that only one person could get in and out of the control at a time. Unfortunately Nick Dent came across this control when there were two women in the gap. The one punching was trying to come out and the other was trying to get in. It was a stalemate for  what seemed like an eternity but those few seconds cost Nick a place in the A Final. As expected Gayle and I didn't feature in the A finals. With 432 in my class competition was hot and with winners running under 6 minute kms both in the sprint and in the bush it was tough to get anywhere.

The following day we headed to Goslar for the sprint final.
This was a very tricky area with lots of bridges crossing streams and no real pattern to the streets. Funnily enough Gayle and I had found ourselves in the assembly area 2 days before when we  err like got lost heading to Bad Harzburg.
So here was the event with the assembly on the grass outside the Presidential Palace ( Boy imagine finishing on the grass in front of Parliament House). The sprint was a lot pof fun. The drizzly weather made footing a little uncertain on cobblestones. Running through streets and platzs full of tourists made concentration a task. What a day.

Then  we went to the bush. Long Qualification 1 was held SW of Bad Harzburg. This area is a private forest and will never be used again.
It had plenty of rock in the upper areas unfortunately it was often in dark green and setters seemed to delight in that. My 4th control a small depression was absolutely surrounded by large rocks none of which were mapped. It was physically hard work and fortunately the weather was reasonably cool. We rode a narrow gauge steam train to the assembly area. As it is a qualifier no one hangs around much for the results. You could get the results on your phone at the event site which was far faster than waiting for them to appear.







Long Qual 2 was held in a delightful town Claus wkv to the NW of Bad Harzburg. This time the terrain was very fast, very runnable and unfortunately featured around 700 metres of dead orienteering on the way home. However that said the forest was soft and lovely with lots of sink holes and much to the merriment of orienteers places called "Charcoal Burning" pits. We are still trying to work it out as when you arrived there was the control and there may have been a slight depression.




 The Long Final.
After a rest day it was off to the final. The assembly area was in a huge quarry. The courses for those not in the A Final were very much a run that is all. The control sites were easy. Mind you the course setter had his revenge as all courses climbed a rather large hill ( 15 contours). If they had turned the course around we would have had a much better chance of heading further north where there some complx rock features.



And so the carnival is over and troops scattered all over the place. Of the 71 Aussies competing Herman Wehner and Jenny Bourne picked up medals in the sprint and Su Yan Tay  and Natasha Key scored medals in the long.
It appears that more and more aussies are heading to WMOC. 2013 in Italy will be interesting as once more WMOC is reunited with the World masters Games and we all have experienced the added cost and whoo hah that goes with that.
2014 in Brazil is looking really good..

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Yes it was cold in Norway. But spectacular! Here we are somewhere north of the arctic circle.