WA day 9- orienteering at Malmalling and catching up with the Castelijns

For the first time in the entire holiday we set the alarm to make sure we were up in time. We had planned to orienteering at Malmalling,  which meant and hour and a half to drive, skirting Perth city and heading to the east (towards Kalgoorlie).
Our trusty navigator came to the fore once more, and we arrived at the orienteering in good time. It was good to see the familiar direction signs as we neared the event. Surprisingly, we followed a ute with SA number plates to the event. It turned out to be Gary Ettridge from Pt. Lincoln!!

The WA orienteers made us very welcome as we registered our SI sticks into their system and they already had our names on file!!!

The area is a mix of native bush and pine, but we were all in the native bush for our courses (running across one open area of felled pine early on). The native bush was largely made up of grass trees, which hid boulders beautifully, and gave us some excellent experience with low visibility orienteering.

It's hard to pick out a rock between the close growing grass trees. In many places they were much thicker than this example.

Trevor and I both opted to do the H3 (third hardest) course which was 4.9 km long according to the notices. It is always a good experience to orienteer somewhere new, and this area certainly taught us some more. It was difficult to move fast amongst the rocky ground and thick grass trees, and easy to lose contact with exactly where we were on the map,  as we couldn't get a clear view of the terrain. This caused us some difficulties, but the locals appeared to have as much trouble as we did.
We both took a good long time to complete our courses (Trevor took 1 hr 35 in and Erica 1 hr 43, but Trevor covered almost 2 km more ground at a much better run rate!). Erica was surprised by a mispunch result, having not checked the control  number at 2, and punched 6 instead. (Trap for new players still catching out an old player). Control 5 (low visibility, and hard to tell where on the hill you were), 6 (a long leg with some vague areas, where you really needed to stay in touch with the map) and 9 (we both had to relocate at least once to find the small boulder which  was hidden nicely between the grass trees) were controls where we both wasted time.

Trev's  course download. 

Orienteering WA have a volunteer run shop with basic O supplies. All profits go to the juniors transport fund so that they can make it to the national events each year. They also have a caravan/trailer which is the registration and download point, with info and results on one side and the people with the computer on the other side.

We liked their easy registration procedure where each person comes to the window, pays their money and "dibs" their SI stick to register, and personally tells the person doing the computing which course they are running .

Results were printed out from the splits printer and placed on the info side of the van (small to read, but available if people wanted them)

Results in course order from the splits printer

The event was a schools selection race, so the kids were out in full and the juniors were selling soup and cakes to fund raise for their travel.

Having taken much longer than we had anticipated at the event with our time out on the course and our chatting with the WA crowd, we made a  quick lunch stop at Mandaring on the way in to Perth to catch up with our good friends Maggie and Nick and their lovely daughters  Sarah and Rebekah.

We spent a lovely few hours chatting, eating and helping them to complete the jigsaw puzzle they were working on before reluctantly saying goodbye and leaving them to their preparations or school and work today.

Another excellent day in WA.