The big news from the Northern Tablelands event at Banalasta last weekend was that Alinta & Felicity placed first and second on the Long Hard course. To my knowledge, this club has not previously had a female orienteer capable of beating the men on the long course (at least not in the 20 years that I have been a member), and now we have two!
The weather tried to steal the limelight, but fortunately the forecast of a fine Sunday was accurate. However Saturday’s rain resulted in the last flags not being hung until Sunday morning, and a last minute change to the access track. The mud in the gateway at the yards looked bad, but amazingly no-one got stuck!
Although numbers attending were not huge, it was good to meet Victoria and Libby from Tamworth, and we hope to see them at future events. It was also great to meet the students from Armidale – Tadeusz, Shani & Gwen. They win the “Perseverance Cup”, showing a dogged determination to finish whatever they started.
It was obvious from results during the year that Felicity and Alinta were giving the men some serious competition, but this event saw a significant step up. As can be seen from the split times, their secret was consistency; the lead swapped between Felix, Peter & Eric in the early stages, but all the men fell away during the later stages to give Alinta & Felicity a very clear victory (10 minutes between 1st and 3rd). In fact the splits reveal some hilarious blunders – Alinta & Felicity both took less than 4 minutes on leg 9, while Don took 12 minutes and Peter 19 minutes!! The splits also show that Tadeusz, thrown in the deep end on some of the most complex terrain available to our club, was quite competitive over most of the course – his major time losses were concentrated into a few legs - so we hope he continues to come to club events, and build on the progress he has made.
The sausages and soup seemed to go down well, only problem seemed to be that I didn’t cook enough sausages!
Thanks to Eric Baker for bringing in 9 controls during his run – he says it cost him about a minute a control, but even if we took 9 minutes off his time, Alinta would clearly still have won. We will forgive Eric for failing to punch control 8 – his hands were full!
Our thanks go to Grant Campbell, the manager of Birralee Station (which now owns all of the area covered by the “Banalasta” map), for permission to use the area. We should also thank the map maker, Eric Andrews from Stanthorpe. As I wandered among all the huge rocks either side of the main creek to the west, I kept thinking what a privilege it was to have access to such a spectacular area, and to have such a good map.
Thanks to Alec Watt for this report.
