Orienteering race 1:45:25 [3] **** 9.02 km (11:41 / km) +277m 10:08 / km
spiked:12/18c shoes: Luath Blue XTalon 212s
Middle Creek South red 6.1 km
Meet 7, course 10
A good course set by Ben; technically about as challenging as it could be and on the south side of the creek, which was fresh as we have not visited it in quite a while. I had some good legs, particularly compass legs but had a number of controls that had visibility issues (a bit of this was attributable to me and part was the placement of the controls). Control 4 was in a small reentrant that I looked at, ran across the top of, looked again and then proceeded to the next nearby reentrant. I was pretty certain the first was right and was surprised there was no bag. When I went back, it was so, barring teasing gnomes, I must have had trees in my sightline multiple times on the first pass. Not a good start and it should have modified my approach to dealing with the searching in the circles.
C7 was my biggest error, I ran past it within 25 m. The bag was next to a downed tree on a fence across a small reentrant that was not connected to the more obvious dotted ditches. I passed it on the bottom and it wasn't so obvious and then had a huge relocation going to 20 m from the top before it caught my eye.
C12 was exactly as depicted in the circle on a rootstock. I met some runners before and wondered to them how far in front Aragorn was. When I got to the circle, I saw a 2.5m rootstock a bit further up the hill (still in the circle). No bag, couldn't see a bag, looked a bit more, saw Casey who was doing the same. Decided that I might be one spur off because of my attention lapse. Eventually came back and found the bag tucked between two smaller rootstocks that had 0.5 m above ground. It was the right place but very tricky.
As Mike pointed out, the footing was rotten through the day, I moved intentionally at a slow, ankle protecting pace. Good day; maybe next time we can do it when it is warm :)