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

Written by W. Bastian published in the February 2022 edition of The Grapevine
 
At TREC Ireland and West Cork TREC, we use the Ordnance Survey Maps of Ireland, Discovery Series. The OSI maps have a scale of 1:50,000 (1cm on the map is 50,000cm or 500m in nature), but are normally blown up to a scale of 1:25,000 (1cm on the map is 25,000cm or 250m in nature).
 
West Cork is covered by the OSI maps Nr.84 – Nr.87, available in your local bookstore or tourism information centre.
 
On the bottom of the map is the “Legend”, which explains in detail what you see on the map: roads, rivers, woodlands, houses, and other landmarks, which help you identify your position.
 
Make yourself familiar with the map. Take it to a place in your area and find your position and your surroundings on the map.
 
Attend a map reading training. West Cork TREC offers training days – for more information on these training days check our Facebook or Instagram pages or our calendar.
 
Basic Rule 1: The top of the map is geographically North, the bottom is South, the right side is East and the left side is West. Obviously, it depends in which direction you hold the map in front of you, that the North on the map (⇒top of the map) is identical with the Magnetic North of in nature. You will need a compass to align the map with the Magnetic North.

The North on the map is called the “Grid North”. You can see parallel vertical and horizontal lines on the map. These are the “Gridlines”, which run vertically from North to South and horizontally from East to West.

These Gridlines are in numerical order and are important for the “Grid References”, which you will need when moving to a higher level in TREC.
 
Basic Rule 2: The gridlines make squares, where they intersect each other. Each square is 1km long and 1km wide, no matter what the scale of the map is. This helps you to estimate distances on your map.
 
To be continued with POR (Orienteering) Part 2