I volunteered to set the Autumn 12 hour rogaine in 2010 shortly after the Australian Championships in 2009. I also approached Gary Carroll to be a cosetter and Keith Stewart and Steve Brown to be vetters. This would have been the same team that set and vetted the Australian Championships in 2009. We worked well together then and they all agreed to come on board. I had seen an interesting area that had not been used before and I made a couple of trips to talk to various farmers. The farmers I saw were agreeable to having an event, but there were many others that I needed to see. Other commitments prevented me spending as much time as was needed on talking to the farmers and then I travelled overseas for five weeks at Christmas. When I returned from the holiday I realized that time was becoming too short and I needed to find a site quickly. An examination of old rogaine maps gave me the idea of reusing the area used for the “A Picnic in the Pingle” event in 2000. I took a quick trip to the farm that is found in the centre of the area and met the farmers. They had allowed us to use their farm several times in the past and readily agreed to have us back another time. (The other area has been put on hold for another day).

At about this time Gary Carroll announced that he would not be able to help set the event as he was planning to move to Tasmania to live. I had no trouble in recruiting Jim Klinge, a friend and fellow master’s runner, to join the team as a setter. An application to use the area was sent off the DEC. As the area was also a drinking water catchment DEC had to refer the application to the Water Corporation. Luckily the approval process did not take too long and we were able to start planning the course. The only restriction we faced was a request to stay out of some areas due to the
presence of rare flora, which caused some inconvenience as we had already planned half a dozen controls in the restricted areas.

The loss of Gary Carroll from the team gave us a name for the event. After a number of trips, we had 69 controls set and a map prepared. Considerable effort went into selecting suitable control sites, and the vetting process went well – four controls had to be repositioned (wrong place) and several more were moved because of concerns about the feature (usually too vague). The position of all controls was verified using a
GPS. The weekend before the event we hung the controls.

The Friday before the event went smoothly. The various tents were erected and a fire was prepared. Keith and I had spent some time collecting firewood in my trailer. Ron Lockley and friends obviously thought our efforts were inadequate and they proceeded to drag larger logs to the fire site with 4WD vehicles. On Friday evening we organised a free sausage sizzle. This was well attended and encouraged people to come and socialize. We put out some of the water drops on Friday afternoon and the rest on Saturday morning.

Saturday turned out to be a cool day that was ideal for rogaining. A light shower of rain in the morning did not cause too many problems. Competitors were faced with a varied course – hilly in the west and south-west with tightly spaced controls and good points per kilometre, or flatter with more widely spaced controls in the east and lower points per kilometre. People went everywhere, which was pleasing for the organizers, and there were some good scores achieved. The winning team went east and collected nearly all controls (except one of the 100-pointers in the NE corner (!) and then headed west, but ignored the extreme west of the course.

I’m not sure what happened out on the course, but I do know that Administration operated efficiently and that the Hash House fed everyone to their satisfaction.

If you competed in the event I do hope that you had a memorable rogaining experience.

Jim Langford on behalf of the setting and vetting team