Our first WET event of the season was an amazingly fun course put on by Roger MacLeod with perfect weather - 11 controls covering a good chunk of the Park, Campus and Cell phone tower Mountain created a good mix of orienteering with lots of route choice. Congrats to Larry who snuck in an extremely close victory by a 13 second margin, nice work! I'm missing printouts for a bunch of people, so please don't forget to print your results if you want your name in lights on the WET results page!

-Scott

WET Results writeup

The course was set in such a way that no excessive climbing or crawling through thickets should be necessary. As we all know (by now) is that the Mt Doug map is not very precise with trails that are there but not on the map and vice versa. But one has to give credit to the persons that actually made this map manually back in the days. Impressive. The paths around control nr 5 seemed to fool quite few of the runners today and I believe Larry know every bits and pieces of that area now. Some of the runners also tried to skip a control, but as we all know, this won’t work at the Wednesday trainings and they managed to go back and get them in the right order. Roger cruised around the course and got the best time today, even though he almost skipped a control by going through an unnecessary thicket. John just clocked in before Marie with Ben and Martin some two and a half minutes behind.

Kids course writeup

My son Inge presented orienteering in his show and tell session today at school and some of his class mates joined in today. They all had great fun and went out on the larger lap after the shorter one was completed. In the end I had to go and meet them and they clocked in at just about 87 minutes. It was a long evening in the woods, but their spirit was still high. Kerry got the best time today after catching up with the larger group.

Aviva and Skye fled through the course, but did not find the last control. They went back for it and Aviva sprinted the last leg and finished just ahead of Skye as number 2 and 3.

Cheers,

Frode

An excellent turnout, perfect weather and super fun and challenging course highlighted John's WET #3 at Thetis Lake. This was the lesser-used back side of Thetis, a map area new to many people. Congrats to Frode who had a near perfect run scooping up 12 controls in 23 minutes for the win. Your humble club VP (me) came in 4 minutes later and Roger another 7 minutes after that for the 2nd and 3rd spots. Almost everyone seemed to have at least one tricky control that cost them dearly (except Frode). Thanks to all who came out - See you next week, fingers crossed for more amazing weather!

-Scott

Tonight was a super fun rip through a lesser-used area of Royal Roads with amazing weather for the fourth week in a row. Thanks to first-time event organizer Tobi for doing a great job and creating a challenging course with lots of route choice. John, clearly recovered from his bad knee edged out Frode by less than a minute for the win, Jade scooped up a hard-earned third place mere seconds behind Frode. CP5 proved to be a tricky one, causing several orienteers to wander for an 15-20 additional minutes.

Fastest splits were spread out quite evenly with no runner claiming more than 3 out of 11 total splits, including winner John with 3 fastest and 2nd place Frode with only 1 fastest split - just going to show you that this is anyone's game!

Don't forget : Next wednesday there is no WET because of Canada Day, see you in two weeks!

-Scott

In what some are already calling "the most fun event of the summer", 15 orienteers sprinted their way through flowy hills of the Prior Lake area this evening. As usual, we enjoyed some outstanding weather and delicious fast-paced navigation but this time added the option of an after-race skinny dip at nude friendly Prior Lake. What more could you ask for really? John Downey apparently on fire these days scooped up first place for the second week in a row followed very closely by Ben and myself. Thanks to Gill and Leigh for planning a very fun course.

-Scott

First-time WET organizer Valerie did an amazing job setting up a course at Uplands Park. Some tricky control locations challenged even the speediest of runners levelling the playing field quite a bit. Roger came out on top with a super clean run and a good two minute margin over John. Andrew had one of his best runs to date edging out myself by an annoying 21 second (congrats Andrew).

Special mention and "thrown in the pool" award goes to Valerie for being a total trooper learning Purple Pen course setting software with virtually no assistance on her first ever event. Also of note, tonight we said farewell to Frode who is leaving Victoria and headed back home to Norway. Frode was cause for some excellent competition and will be missed!

-Scott

Andrew and Dawn put on a fun and extremely challenging course at Francis King Park tonight. First place went to John with a time of 48:43. His win came at the unfortunate cost of his car keys which are somewhere out there swimming in the salal. John has long been the VICO poster boy for why you should carry a compass and know the safety bearing - now he can add "why you should leave your keys at the Start" to the list. Larry made it in 2nd, and Leigh managed an impressive 3rd place showing the youngsters how it's done!

Next week will bring us to the half-way point of the WET series, and I'd like to stop and take a moment to express my sincere thanks to everyone who has participated thus far. We've had a lot of amazingly fun events put on by old timers and newbies alike - things have rolled along quite smoothly and I haven't actually had to do much real organizing, so thanks! We do have a couple of upcoming weeks without a volunteer (Aug 5th and Sep 2nd), so if you haven't yet stepped up and you're feeling a bit guilty, fire me an email! :)

-Scott

Chris organized an exciting fast-paced sprint through Beacon Hill Park using pin-flags instead of our usual SI controls. Unfortunately due to the sheer number of people living and/or partying in the park, pin-flags was our only real option here. Having a course with over 20 controls meant you were finding them quickly for maximum entertainment. I managed to unseat John from his perpetual #1 position with hopefuls Larry, Andrew and Tobi not too far behind. Beautiful weather as always for our Wednesday nighters!

-Scott

Larry put on a technical medium length course at Mt. Doug which proved to be a challenge for many! 1st place was an extremely tight race down to about a minute and a half for #1 #2 and #3 over a 45+ minute race. Exhilarating! Thanks to everyone who came out and helped picking up controls.

-Scott

The 10th WET event of the summer was a super fun sprint through Uvic - organized by first-timer Theresa who did an excellent job. Our hidden goal of turning regular people into skilled event organizers is working out quite well so far.

Your humble WET overseer managed to squeak out a 1st place Victory for the third week in a row. However, it was an extremely tight race with John seconds behind me and Andrew and Chris not far after. Andrew haA tip of the hat to Ronan who let his Dad run solo and finished the course on his own getting every single control.

Uvic courses are often "runner's courses" and today was no exception. There is very little room for error and to win at Uvic you pretty much have to sprint your heart out.
Tonight was great training for next week's also fast-paced High Rock Park. Hope to see you there!

-Scott

Jessica and Heather organized a fun and super speedy sprint course at High Rock Park in Esquimalt with the best turnout for a WET event so far this summer! Unfortunately control #8 was slightly misplaced and moved mid-race to the correct location. This meant earlier runners had trouble finding it while later runners had an advantage - I've calculated the results with C8 and without - however since some people never visited C8 at all, the recalculations don't create a level playing field. So the winner of this event was either Roger or me depending on if you count that control.

In any case, High Rock was still a beautiful sprint through the bushes and LARP'ers in great weather and a fun time was had by all! Thanks to Heather and Jessica for putting in the work, and don't worry about the mistake, we still love you guys!

-Scott

Well I guess home court gives us a little bit of a relaxed view of this course and so what we thought would be relatively straight forward turned out to challenge most of our intrepid orienteers. I've been wanting to roll out a Line-O for ages and this just cements how challenging (and FUN) it can be.

Andrew flew the course with a near perfect run to clear 1st place by a long shot. Second on the day was Leigh, showing that youthful determination comes in many forms. Incredible job Leigh. 13 seconds later the team of Heidi and Theresa rounded out the podium. It's easy to miss a control on a line-O and we had 3 MP's. A huge thank you to everyone who made it out today (especially Virginia who attacked the course with baby on board!).

Feedback was great and again, thank you to everyone for trying out this funky new thing. Oh, and thank you to those of you who put in a little extra time for a final game of 'lost and found'. :)

-Jade

Seventeen intrepid explorers braved the day's torrential downpour to join us at Cattle Point last night and were rewarded with blue skies and hot/warm chocolate. Asbjoern took the evening's fastest time, followed by Andrew and Theresa.

This was my first course put together from start to finish so my biggest reward was the many comments that 'the controls were right where I thought they should be!' I'll add that Diana corrected one of my locations when we hung the controls, so thank you for that, Diana. Sorry to all who didn't clear the unintentional water trap and for the unruly blackberries.

Special thanks to Diana for going all over the peninsula to pick up the gear and the lost 'clear' unit and to Dawn, Andrew, Theresa, Greg & Grayson for picking up all the controls for me (!!!!). And thanks to Diana, Kale/Cale(?) and Sam for keeping me company at the start.

-Sara

Ben organized an advanced technical course which was an excellent change for everyone and a great way to test the skills obtained from orienteering all summer! Indeed summer is over and darkness comes early - Andrew pulled off an amazing win finishing his last 3-4 control in pretty low light on a 1:10,000 scale hard to read map, edging out John D by a heart-wrenching 10 seconds. Nice work Andrew. A few slightly misplaced control didn't slow down the usual frontrunners, and the top three runners finished less than 90 seconds apart over an almost 1-hour race. Only a couple weeks left of WET events with light fading fast, make sure to come out and catch the last few events!

-Scott

The event went great. Nine competitors and no big mistakes. Roger smoked it in 15:25, edging out John at16:57. Jade had an undisclosed challenge on the last control and picked up third. Abby the dog finally made it through a whole event off leash without barking at anyone so all and all a success. Moose the dog joined in with Toby and was very well behaved. All dogs loved Dawn's doggy treats.

-Marie

West Thetis WET event went great!
There were fifteen competitors and almost as many dogs.
Most finished before it was too dark. A couple were thankful to have their headlamps.

The smoking fast runners were very close: Andrew took the won in 31:09,
edging out Jade with 31:48, followed closely by John with 33:51.
Others enjoyed time in the park while exploring.

BIG THANKS to Marie for working with me to check my course and then doing the "caboose" swept
with Abby and picking up controls and making sure everyone finished.
And also to Diana for walking around with me in the afternoon setting up the controls.

A great time had by all!

-Joye

Nat and her awesome crew expertly organized a super fun race through Beaver Lake Park. The navigation took us to both sides the lake with some unforgiving control locations, requiring you to be right on the button.

Tobi snagged first place with a clean fast run with myself and John minutes behind, both foiled by #10. Night-vision Andrew took a week off from first place. Thanks to Nat and pals for doing a great job on the course for our second-to-last WET of the season. Hope to see you next week for the final!

-Scott