QOC Fountainhead

 On Sunday I attended QOC's Fountainhead orienteering meet. I ran the Orange course; still running the intermediate courses until I'm well under 2 hours. Don't want to try and jump to Brown/Beige (advanced) until then. 

Well, got my second under-2 hour Orange under my belt, despite my 40+ minutes trying to find control 4! One, two and three went so swimmingly I got cocky and thought "Maybe I'll be at an hour thirty!" Then control 4. 

If you can see, there was a trail between 3 and 4, along the river. Coming off 3 I got on the south trail (near the number 8 in the map) so backtracked and got on the trail. But where I was, counting the reentries, I was way off. I tried to cut south to cut the times but then thought I was on the wrong trail again. Finally I got on the right trail but began to worry as I couldn't find the right spot to head NE to the rootstocks. Then I saw a flag on the right and damn, wrong side. Sure as crap, it was control 5. Well damn.

So I got back on the trail and went up to 4. Instead of turning around, I took the trail south toward control 6, took a gander at it so I'd remember, then went back to 5, turned around and quickly to 6. Control 4 to 5 I did in 10:31, 5 to 6 in 4:58, then nine minutes to 7. Control 8 was fun as that little loop coming off the main trail was for mountain bikers, large wooden mini-bridges and boom, there's 8. Nine took a while since we had to go around the water. Control 9 to the finish took 8 minutes, lots of contour lines to go through and then when I got near the start, I couldn't find the finish at first. Of course, I saw someone starting with a basenji (like our dog!) but hadn't finished yet; once I beeped done the basenji was gone. 

Final time 1:50:26. If I could have found 4 in a decent time (10-ish minutes) that would have brought me down significantly. From 25 out of 37 to 16 out of 37!