Orienteering race 1:40:00 [5] ***** 5.5 km (18:11 / km) +200m 15:23 / km
shoes: Montrail Highlander
Champs day 2. Resolving not to make the same mistakes as yesterday, I started more cautiously and managed the first couple controls OK. #5 proved to be another nightmare. Got to about 200m from control with good map contact, then it should have been a cakewalk to hold a line and find the second swamp with the control on it. Unfortunately, there were a lot more swamps than I was expecting, and I had not paid enough attention to distance and other features to know which were the mapped ones. Not wanting to have another 1hr leg like yesterday, I decided to bale quickly--which in this case was probably the wrong decision as I could have probably just continued on my bearing, checking each swamp as I went along. Instead I decided to head S to what should have been a huge obvious swamp--then never found it. Now with even less confidence, I decided to change tactics and head E, expecting to either reach the uncrossable swamp (would I know an uncrossable swamp by just looking at it???), or a trail (not likely given the previous day's experience with trails). Surprisingly, I did come across the swamp (and it looked particularly nasty), and then for good measure hunted around for the trail and found it too. After that, it was easy to find #5. So then, on the route to #6, I figured I could find that same trail again and use it. That worked great for a few minutes until the mapped trail exploded into a network of unmapped trails. Several minutes of backtracking and hunting around for a blaze later, I got back on the map and went on to 6.
Determined not to make the same mistakes as yesterday, I compensated by making a new one--skipping the second to last control, leading to a mispunch.