WMOC Long Qualifiers

Long Qual 2

Long Qual 1

Shooting Hide

Down into a sink hole

Clear open and runnable note the tracking

The greenest spot we found

Those sink holes were deep and cavernous

Well it was like this we went to the Long Model event and we were dished up terrain that bore some semblance of similarity to that of the qualifiers.

Where the model had these beautiful sink holes open terrain etc ( see photos) the Long Qual 1 had deep ravine like gullies and no sink holes and Long Qual 2 had sink holes and plenty of vegetation in around and about!

And so we travelled out to Long Qual 1. I must say the organisation has been brilliant and nothing is left to chance.

Petocz was the venue for Long Qual 1. The assembly area was in open ground ( no shade) around a mine ventilation shaft. Nothing to be concerned about except for the nuclear warning signs around as the mine was a uranium mine.

The terrain was crisscrossed with many tracks which made navigation easy and hard if you know what I mean. The toughest part was that the gullies were very steep, hard to get into and hard to get out of. In general the vegetation was easy to cope with although the course setter did like sticking controls into green gullies or green knolls. I was lucky and had an early start as the day proved to be quite hot and so we were on a bus at 7.45am for an 11.10 start. Gayle was off after 12. By the time we got a lift with Nick and Marg back to Pecs we had had 6 hours out in the boiling sun.

Dick was the standout Uringan at this race finishing 15th in his heat. The rest of us were well down the list but not disgraced at all

Long Qual 2 was at Orfu with the assmbly just 600m from where Nick and Marg were staying. Gayle and I had early starts and again it was the early bus. Georgieu, our hotel host just loves 6.40am breakfasts. The area is very scenic and a feature on all courses was the "Man from Snowy River" descent in the final stages of the courses- I went down 22 contours on my descent. I felt rather sorry for some who missed their control on the way down and had to head back up the hill. It would have been soul destroying. Fortuntely Gayle and I along with Dick, Nick, Ian and Marg we made it down unscathed.

For me this day was my waterloo and I struggled. I lost confidence after a ridiculous miss at control 2 and I went from bad to worse. In the end I just took easy route choices to avoid more errors which in many cases added distance and climb. Dick had problems with a period of reading his course upside down and backwards whilst gayle had a run with only one frustration. Nick loved his course but agreed that he lacked speed and so was a good 25 minutes off the pace whilst Margaret was on target for the majority of her course.

And so we look to the finals and hopefully a better performance by some of us

Nick Wilmott- M 50- 24th 27th overall 27th B Final

Ron Pallas - M 55- 60th, 61st, 60th D Final

Ian McKenzie- M60- 44th, 43rd, 44th D Final

Margaret Wilmott- W50- 39th, 49th, 47th C Final

Gayle Shepherd - W55- 37th, 48th, 41st C Final