There are plenty of night events these days, but most of them are score events.

The championships however remain resolutely cross-country courses, no skipping that elusive control and moving on!

If you want to practise a ‘real course’ in Sussex before the Southern Nights, there is an opportunity on Saturday 21st November, at Holmbush Estate and Buchan Country Park. Details on the Mole Valley web site. Vince Joyce likes the courses!

This event will also score for the SONIC (Southdowns Orienteers NIght Cup).

There will be a range of courses:

- Ochre (night Yellow/Orange) 1.5km, all along tracks and paths, although the paths can be hard to spot beneath the fallen leaves

- Olive (night Light Green) 2.9km, some long off-path legs, but the controls will be near relocation features (if you can recognise them in the dark)

- Navy (night Blue) 5.1km, controls in the middle of nowhere (but fair, I hope)

- Bottle (night Green) 3.0km, shorter, but not dumbed-down, version of Navy

This event will include the first ever orienteering use of the paintball area, which features bare woodland floor (paintballers don’t like undergrowth any more than we do, but they are allowed to do something about it) and lots of interesting features.

Get charging those torch batteries!

Many thanks to all at Mole Valley involved with putting on last night’s event in the pouring rain !

It’s a good area and the bottle course was certainly really good, I enjoyed it !

I think the Navy course was also planned well, although unfortunately Mike couldn’t see very much of it on his map - shame about the printing and the weather.

It will count towards the SONiC league, watch this space for the latest league update.

Obviously I was very disappointed with the map printing. It did however show once again what nice people orienteers are, as nobody complained too much.

Mole Valley will be giving free entry to anyone producing an illegible Holmbush map at their next event, which is just around the corner at St Leonard’s Forest on Monday 28th December. (Yes, that is the right date, it’s a public holiday). This will be a full-colour coded event, and facilities are expected to include changing rooms, showers, and a bar. And the map printing will be better!

I enjoyed the event despite, or possibly even because(!), of some of the extra difficulties. My main difficulties were: unpleasant rain (out of anyones control); Head torch not fitting head very well (back to the drawing board for me); Map print flaking off (unwelcome, but didn’t half focus the mind on what was still available to navigate by!).

I think that it was best regarded as it was billed in this thread - “Practise for the Southern Night Championships”. As such, some extra difficulty or adverse event features were not major downers.

One of the aspects of night-O that I like is that you sometimes have to adapt the navigation technique significantly from the norm to be able to progress. An example of this that sticks in my mind was a very foggy night event on a Surrey golf course several years ago where the best techniques for lighting the ground turned out to be either pointing the head torch straight up into the air or taking it off your head and holding it low down in your hand.

The disappearing map print (shades of “Mission Impossible” - this message will self destruct in 10s!) meant that I had to use what minimal information was left on the map to best effect (and not be surprised by unmapped features). A dead reckoning approach between the faint flecks of magenta (course overprint) was slow but surprisingly successful. It was also useful to check the course several controls ahead (in case the rest of the print went in a rush!).

In conclusion, what started off as a standard night-O course in bad weather turned into something that wasn’t really competitive orienteering in the normal sense, but was interesting all the same. Ultimately, useful lessons were learnt all round from the event by participants and the organising team.

NB I thought that the terrain and design of course were excellent - very wierd navigating through the paintball areas, and the controls in the forts were fun!

Peter