Firstly a big  thanks to you all who made the big trip down to the DamBusters rogaine and we hope you did enjoy our event. I wanted to find an area close to Bunbury that hadn’t been used before and the area south of Collie looked promising but as Wellington Dam is in a water catchment area (thick bush in watercourses) i wasn’t getting too hopeful but after spending 4 hours driving around last August i soon realised it looked pretty good so fellow setter Ian Thomsett got the contours and put it into OCAD format for me and away we went. The plan was to have it finished by end of November as too dam hot up there in summer and we achieved that (just) as vetters were pretty
useless at times or away travelling but one can only be patient working with the retired. Finding an area is pretty easy but your biggest problem then is to find a good HH site that is in middle of map (mission impossible folks!) so after spending time on Google Maps it became apparent that the paddock at bottom of map was it and what a beauty it turned out to be, especially with the sealed road all the way to the gate as it was quite a concern for us that a lot of you Perthies wouldn’t like dust on your 4WDs so it was a no-brainer (is that one or two words Nick?) [I’ll give you the third option, a hyphen ... Ed]

Permission to use paddock took 30 seconds (gee i’m good) but what worried me most was seeing all the Nissan vehicles in driveway as i only had one tow rope. Finally SONS (Ian) got off his bum and decided to help me start setting and finding control sites wasn’t too hard but what did take ages was the amount of time put into checking out all the tracks and adding or deleting them as we drove around. Many tracks were blocked so with the Garmin in hand we either walked or cycled them to check ‘em out but after a couple of weekends we had done the job so after dragging Vicki and Craig out of Dan Murphys we “convinced” them they only had 2 days to vet it as Ashes was coming and didn’t want to miss that and sure enough by mid October we had a very thorough vetters report. We still didn’t have a name for the rogaine and i wanted something with the Wellington Dam involved and it really hurts me to say that Donna (Ian’s boss) gave it its name after about 3 seconds of thought. Dragon !! Map was now 90% completed so after watching Poms get their Boxing Day Test flogging Donna allowed Ian to come down and change a few things that vetters recommended.

We did nothing for 3 months but once April arrived it was time for Ian to teach me how to use OCAD (a fancy program thingy for making maps) and i very much enjoyed it as it was great fun learning how to make a proper map and i do thank Ian for his patience with me as i am pretty useless with a computer as well as slow – like this writeup will take me well over 2 hours  to do so be grateful you lot!

You all know how awesome our farmers  Tony and Lyn were and they got a huge kick out of seeing all of you on THEIR property having a great time BUT they were blown away by WARA’s hash site with all the tents and hash marquees set up plus the long line of tents leading down the paddock. Lyn told me later she will never forget the looks on the faces of competitors as they looked into the fire as if meditating and totally relaxed ( i didn’t have the heart to say that yous were either buggered or half full) and if Tony’s  fire isn’t HH fire of the decade then i’m not here. Also we were only able to get a permit for HH fire  just 2 days before event due to the dry conditions and the 20 mm of rain that fell 5 days before saved us. How lucky we were people. WARA was made very welcome and they want us to come back and we will so thanks to the many people who introduced themselves to them and thanked them for the use of their land. Word will get around the area about those “mad buggers” who wander around the scrub at night but who are really friendly which then makes it easier for the next time someone wants to set a rogaine near there.

We were really-no-extremely disappointed that the confirmed booking of the coffee van didn’t eventuate and the owner made the “professional” decision to send me a txt saying his coffee machine wasn’t working properly and by the time he fixed it it wasn’t economical for him to turn up but he did wish to deal with WARA next time - don’t think so mate !! SONS and i are always looking at ways to improve our maps and hope you thought the idea of the descriptions on the reverse side of map, coloured triangle and the event no. was ok  by you. Please let WARA know one way or the other as constructive comments are very much welcome as you blokes are what it’s all about and we want to keep improving.

Well that’s about enough from me and like our vetters i am now off overseas to celebrate retirement while poor Ian has to keep on working. Seeyas at next rogaine everyone!