A blustery training session on Ganavan

Using compasses

On a blustery, rainy Sunday morning several juniors and their parents turned out at Ganavan for an hour’s orienteering training.

On a blustery, rainy Sunday morning several juniors and their parents turned out at Ganavan for an hour’s orienteering training.

The juniors learnt how to set their maps using their compasses and then had great fun putting their new-found skills into practice racing round a cone exercise on the sand. Keeping hold of the map and manipulating their compass was enough of a challenge for some little fingers without the added difficulty of the wind snatching at their maps. Quite a lot of map chasing ensued!

After that, the juniors had a go at distance estimation and then working out how many double-paces they had to walk to complete 100 metres. Distance estimation is a very useful skill to have whilst orienteering and is something that the juniors will acquire as they develop their orienteering bag of tricks.

Finally, the session was completed with a map exercise that entailed a junior picking a control on the map, describing what they would expect to see when they got to the control, then running to find it. Some of the older juniors practiced putting out controls accurately.

A big thank you must go to Ross for all his planning and hard work on the day which resulted in the juniors and the adults learning loads and having lots of fun. Thank you also to Ross and all the adult helpers for giving up their free time to make for a very successful training session.
We look forward to seeing you all next week at Tralee for Junior Training Session 2 before the club event and social. Barnacle Bill’s Treasure Hunt is not to be missed!