Taranaki Rogainers Scoop at Eastbourne

Course planner Mike Sheridan who lives at Eastbourne has long wanted to run a rogaine in the bush bordering the eastern side of Wellington harbour. From the harbourside suburbs the hills rise to 300m, with the stream system generally running N-S. Beyond the first ridge the area is almost completely untracked, but the bush is quite passable, with only a little supplejack in some of the gullies.

Sheridan set 41 controls between Wainuiomata in the north and Butterfly Creek in the south, with a tempting 90-point outlier at Camp Bay on the road to Pencarrow Heads. The other maximum-pointers were at the lookout near the Wainuiomata Road summit, the end of Lees Grove in Wainuiomata, and deep in Gollans Stream near Mt Lowry, at 373m the highest point on the map. Some of most successful teams headed north along the harbour edge to Point Howard before climbing into the bush and working their way south. Many of those who began at the south end found that the inevitable discrepancy between plans and actuality left them short of the high-pointers between Wainuiomata and Lowry Bay, but Cross and Corry managed it with 2 minutes to spare.

Typical of rogaine calculations, the winners' score was different from that announced on the night, with 80 points having escaped both the results crew and the team themselves! This put Cross and Corry 110 points out in front of Taranaki vet men Neil Higgens, Nick Collins and Rod Smillie. 70 points further back Tony Brindle and Michael Wood (Hutt Valley) whiskered in ahead of Tony Gazley and Dave King from Wellington.

Ben and Fiona Clendon won the mixed open category with an excellent 7th place overall, just 20 ahead of another Taranaki team, containing Ramash Swamy, Susan and Aaron Chambers. Rob Newbrook and Suzanne Scott (Taranaki) won Mixed Vet (18th overall), while Annie Sanderson and Jacqui Sinclair (Taranaki) were the Womens vet champions two places behind. Jo Holden and Jenny Cossey kept the local honours up by taking the open women.

Inspect the full results and check out where you would have gone by viewing the map. You can even see who did what by downloading the visits spreadsheet

Written by Michael Wood and updateded on 16 Apr 02.

And now some comments from course planner Mike Sheridan:

• Small area to take advantage of.
• Should have encouraged travel further east with higher points values for 35 and 53!
• Very encouraged by the amount of off track travel
• Interestingly enough the two spot prizes for free entry to next years event went to the winning team of Al Cross and Nigel Corry, and team 10 – a team new to rogaining of Michael Young, Darren Cooke, Daryl Anderson and Dean Ashton.
• There were 25 spot prizes worth about $600. A novel way of awarding them – perhaps too much emphasise on the faster teams! Will think about that for next year. Thanks to Hutt City Council for helping out with these prizes.
• Course vetter seems to have done a good job with no consistent comments about control site errors.
• All control cards were vetted, and results checked by 5.30 on the day. On checking the results the next day there was one minor error picked up where the winners added their sheet incorrectly – Same mistake was made by the vetter. Luckily the error had no affect on the placings giving Al and Nigel another 80 points!
• Good to see so many teams new to the sport – Will need to have a novice category next time. Also the HVOC club training evenings paid dividends – with some very good results from some of the attendees. The club will definitely be running this programme again – Watch the web site, and also Cool Runnings. Will look to run the programme again in the lead up to another major rogaine. (Maybe the Hawkes Bay event in December?)