Never Going To Be A Great Day When.....

There's a fault with your sewage pump - not a euphemism - and you have to delve into the depths of the 'waste' sump..... mmmmm, lovely. Thankfully it wasn't a major fault, quickly fixed but I had to wash my hands half a dozen times before I was happy they were properly clean!

Anyway, to more important matters, I royally screwed up today's orienteering over at Cranham. I got off to a steady start, navigating myself around the first 9 controls reasonably efficiently, using the map well to steer myself around the course. It wasn't the easiest terrain though. Whether it was just down to my poor route choice but I found that on certain bits the only sensible way to a control was to go through some of the denser woodland areas. It was that or a long way around. Maybe it was just me.

It all went wrong on the way to ten. In truth it was my own fault. It was a long traverse and the obvious way was to the follow the footpaths... I took my eye off the ball - or more accurately, the map. The organisers notes on the website made it clear that some of the paths shown on the map might not exist in quite the way appear on the map and that some new paths wouldn't show on the map at all. With that knowledge I should have stuck to closely monitoring the map - but I didn't. By the time I realised I wasn't where I thought I would be I was a little lost and had to follow a bearing to pick up an obvious feature. That lost me much time. Eventually to ten I rushed off towards 11. I should really have taken my time and regrouped but I didn't. With my ability to map read temporarily deserting me I did, what some might consider, a bloody good impression of a headless chicken - what a nob. Anyway, after almost deciding to jack it in I finally found eleven and from there to the finish the route was pretty much all obvious paths.

Despite it being a total disaster it was definitely worth going. Hopefully I will learn from the lesson and the cob webs have definitely been blown away ahead of the start of the season in a few weeks time.