Beautilful Hills at Auckland Champs

Last weekend we had the Auckland Champs up here. Day 1 and Day 2 were very different. Day 1 started with a loop in the native area North of Inland Road. The middle of the course was flat out with lots of track. The last loop to finish off the course was my favourite. I have scanned it in at the bottom of the post. It was low pine trees, much younger than Spaghetti Soup, with not too much cutty grass. Was quite similar to the green area from the Celebre map. Out of the elites, most of us managed to hash at least one of the native controls, and it was this final loop that made the difference in the end. 16 caught out Jason Markham, who had been leading at that point. 18 caught a few; difficult to get a nice attack point and very easy to drift past it into the broad re entrant beyond. My route through this part of the map aimed to keep my speed high for as much of the leg as possible before using a big feature to prompt me to slow down. It worked pretty well, except on 18 where I lacked a strong feature and slowed it down to micro navigate. The course was definitely not boring, I really liked having to use very different techniques throughout the course. Probably very very different from Canterbury Champs this weekend