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Notes by Bastian

8/3/2022

POR (Orienteering) Part 2

Written by W. Bastian published in the March 2022 edition of The Grapevine

Prior to the competition you will be given times for the equipment inspection, the veterinary inspection and for entering the map room.

Always be on time!

The Map Room:
When called up to enter the map room, you should have all your equipment ready to use efficiently in the time you are given. The times can vary between 5 minutes for Level 1 and 20 minutes for Level 4. The “master map” is fixed on the table. You will be given a blank map to copy the route from the master map onto your map.

Use a fine liner in a colour which shoes the route clearly on the map. We recommend using “STAEDTLER triplus fineliner” in the colours orange, pink or purple. Other colours could be confused with features on the map. For example: blue shows water, green shows trees, yellow and red show roads. A fine liner makes very fine lines, which is important to mark the route very precisely. The width of 1mm on your map with a scale of 1:25,000 is 25m in reality. For example, your route on the master map can be a very narrow track along the side of a road and is marked on the right side of the road. Do not forget the arrows along the route, which show the direction you have to ride.

Basic Rule 3: Copy the route from the master map as exactly as possible, because 1mm copied wrong is a 25m mistake when riding. The map room steward will tell you the speed your have to ride into the next checkpoint and how a “ticket” will look like. They will also tell you when you only have one minute left before you have to leave the map room. Now you should have:

Copied the map already,
Collect your map room equipment,
Put your copied map into a map holder,
Be ready to leave the map room immediately when the steward tells you.

Leaving the map room late, will incur penalty points. Keep in mind, that the timer is already running when you leave the map room. Do not lose time to adjust the take on your horse, mount quickly and off you go.

To be continued with POR (Orienteering) Part 3

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Winter League - Competition 4

3/3/2022

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Competition 27th February '22 - PTV in Bantry

The fourth leg of our league was held on Sunday 27th Feb 2022 at Bantry Bay Pony Trekking. Caitlin was the Chef de Piste and Adèle was the Technical Delegate for the event. It was Caitlin's first time in the role of Chef de Piste, and she designed a challenging course of 16 obstacles for the riders.

An additional obstacle, the Low Branches, was used as a sort of associated difficulty - this obstacle was optional and unscored, and could be attempted twice during the course (from opposite directions) but the rider could bypass them completely if they so wished. While a true associated difficulty would normally be judged for effectiveness and any faults noticed would affect the scores of the following obstacle, it was decided not to judge the Low Branches at all in either direction but rather to use this opportunity to introduce the obstacle to the horses.

We received 30 entries for the event. Along with our non-riding volunteers, we also needed some of the riders in the arena to help judge other levels. We split the day into two sessions divided by a 25-30 minute break. Level 3 riders were first in the arena, followed by the Level 2 riders. Caitlin then held a second course walk during the break for the remaining riders (both the Level 1 class and the Under 16 Newcomer Level 1 class). Adèle and Jill went to work on processing the score sheets while the last two classes were in progress. The scoring was finished while the course was being dismantled, and results were announced shortly afterwards in the arena and rosettes were handed out.

Many thanks to Georgia and Bantry Bay Pony Trekking for the use of their facilities, to all the riders, and judges and helpers for helping to make this event run smoothly, to Adèle as the Technical Delegate, and to Caitlin for designing the course.