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Orienteering Women’s training weekend

I had read that there was an orienteering women’s training weekend happening at St Helens, but entries had closed when I went to join in. On the Friday, however, I got the bright idea of seeing if there’d been any cancellations. Weee. I was in.

Bush scenery from my weekend

First session was in 3 hours, but I had made dough and needed to bake the bread or my efforts would be wasted; I had to pack, of course, and drive 90 minutes to the venue in the Fingal valley. Hm. Rush rush. I threw gear into a bag (without a great deal of thought) while the bread was cooking, threw food with equal haste down my gullet, and set out for the location, Rajah Rocks.

Dawn Bay of Fires. I decided I didn’t want inside accomodation.

Here we practised a Middle distance course in a fabulously rocky area. I had already been training that morning, not realising I would be accepted into the camp, so was pretty tired as I drew near to the finish. As I headed further east to the coast, I witnessed the most wonderful sunset, but needed to keep driving, so hoped there would be more over the next two days. After a fun activity after dinner where we had to build a tower made out of spaghetti and string (and perch a marshmallow on top), I left the 32 or so others to their warm, comfortable accomodation and went to the coast to pitch my tent in the dark.

My tent, my happy place

I wanted to camp, and near the coast, as I love the sound of waves lapping against the shore while I lie in my sleeping bag. It’s a pity I packed my old 1980s bag in my haste: it wasn’t very warm, but I survived, and the beauty  of dawn next morning drove away any thoughts about relocating to standard-type accomodation.

Orienteering day 2. Waiting for things to get underway.

The Saturday contained lots of training sessions and even more camaraderie than that. Our fabulous coach, Francesca, had to design courses for total beginners through to former international representatives, from people who struggled to run to people who were very fit, and with ages from 14 to over 80, and she pleased the lot of us.  Perhaps her biggest problem was to get us to stop chatting and laughing, and get the next session started.  We did relocation in pairs,  compass only (HELP – I decided I was actually a shocking orienteer in this session), and contour only courses, where I was allowed to slightly revise my opinion of myself.

Bay of Fires. Dawn day 2.

On the final day we did a longish course practising long legs. I was stunned that I still had legs left to do this, but once I’d got going, somehow all was fine. It was very lonely out the far end of the long course; I think most took the shorter option for this session.

Tiny Orienteer

I was too busy orienteering (or chatting or eating) to photograph orienteering in action, but I did want to share the beauty side of our weekend, so here it is. As it is a post about orienteering,  I will finish with a shot of one of my very favourite orienteers taken recently rather than this weekend. She’s not quite a woman yet, but I’m sure she’ll join in such a camp one day.

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Bay of Fires 2017 Nov

Bay of Fires 2017 Nov


What does a closely-knitt family do when its members have just farewelled their beloved husband, dada or popa? Lena proposed that we go camping at the beach, and that seemed like an excellent diversion, so as soon as the guests had left, we began organising ourselves to go to the Bay of Fires. And as there are dog-friendly camping spots, Tessa packed her bag too. She was grieving in her own doggy way as much as everyone else, so I did not want to leave her alone at home.


Which do you prefer – scenery, or this little rogue?

The pure white sands, aqua waters and biscuit boulders (with orange icing) worked their charm. We were even blessed with a fabulous sunset. None of these things turns you magically from grief to happiness, but they do operate like balm on a wound, which, although it may not cure the wound, does make it more tolerable, and promises life after the injury. The beauty of the Bay of Fires made us glad to be alive and together, and refreshed us. Here is a selection of photos of the overnight stay.


This sort of thing is calculated to pick my spirits up.


Lena and Tessa play on the rocks


Even in the boring old daytime, it’s still beautiful.

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Bay of Fires 2007 Jan

Bay of Fires Walk  30-31 Jan 2007

We wanted to do the Bay of Fires walk, but did not want to pay a fortune to do what we could do perfectly well without paying anybody to do for us. But!! How do you solve the problem of a left vehicle up north while the walkers finish down south? That bit we couldn’t quite solve. Some enterprising fisher[person needs to offer a kind of water-taxi service like they do in New Zealand.

And precisely because we couldn’t solve that problem any other way, we parked in the middle of this walk. On the first day, we went to the northern end and back with just our daypacks, and the second day, went to the southern end and back. We thus effectively did the walk twice, but without big backpacks, and without the transport problems. We have no objections to backpacks, but big objections to hitchhiking in a car-less environment. This way was much better. It was good to see everything from both northern and southern angles, and the water was so spectacular, it was great to prolong our exposure to its beauty.