EckO Spring News

Inverawe

EckO hope you have all been managing to make the most of the early Spring sunshine and have enjoyed the Inverawe ROMP. Many thanks to Dave for planning and organising the two courses.

ROMP

Whilst the situation still remains unchanged, EckO are still providing a monthly ROMP.

The controls for the Inverawe Romp are still out but will be collected in this Sunday 7th March so why have a weekend extravaganza and try the Inverawe and Fearnoch Romp. They are well worth doing taking you into some of Argyll's beautiful areas but also keeping those orienteering skills ticking over.

The lastest ROMP is now live. Many thanks to Finlo for planning and organising 2 great courses. More details on the Fearnoch ROMP and map here

MapRun

We are steadily increasing the availability and type of Map Run. There are now 2 new Oban MapRuns and a Tyndrum trail run available. Further details on the mapruns are avaiable here

If you would like further help please contact EckO here

AGM and Committee Meeting

Many thanks to all our members who attended the AGM. All business was completed in under an hour. EckO would like to thank all our members for their continued support and particularly our committee members and volunteers, without their knowledge, expertise and committment the events and activities would not happen. Whilst the committee remains largely unchanged, we are looking for a junior co-ordinator and a junior rep. Many thanks to Susannah who has been the EckO junior coordinator for several years and Logan who took on the role of junior rep latterly. If anybody would like to fulfill these roles please contact us or speak to one of the committee members here

The next committee meeting will be held via skype or zoom on Wednesday 31st March at 7.30. Further details with links will be available nearer the time. EckO extends a very warm welcome to any EckO member to attend these meetings. If you would like to join the meeting email EckO here or speak to any committee member.

SWAT (Scottish West Area Training)

The 5 virtual training sessions for SWAT have now finished and well done to Ruairi and Finlay for completing them. I think they will agree with me in saying they were really useful and I for one am really keen to practice what we all learnt.

Plan - always have a plan before you leave a control and ask yourself 3 questions - 1. Where are you now and where are you going? 2. What are you going to see on your way to the control? 3. How are you going to get there?

Direction - what direction are you going to leave the control?

Picture - what do you expect to see on the way to the control?

Distance - how far are you going to travel?

SWAT have now chosen their hoodies complete with SWAT logo and are looking forward to the first event of the junior regional spring series at the end of May (subject to Scottish Government Guidelines)

Future plans

We hope to be back to running our monthly series of activities and events as soon as it is safe to do so and ideally building on coaching and training opportunities for both juniors and adults. Meanwhile, make use of the ROMP and MapRun (we hope to have mapruns available in Lochgilphead and Fort William shortly).

Apologies to our members who don't live in the Oban area and are not able to participate in the ROMP or MapRun due to travel restrictions. Hopefully, we will have at least a MapRun in the areas of Lochaber and Lochgilphead soon. Also, we are happy to mentor anyone who would like to try producing their own maprun.

Finally, now is a good opportunity to enter the Scottish 6Days based in and around Lochaber.