PreO Day 1 - Hot and Rocky

First day of PreO was on the map Quinto do Valongo. The terrain is semi-open grassland with many rock features.

Pinja Makinen of Finland had the only perfect score of the Day, so is in fine position going into Day 2. Top USA results came from David Irving and Clare Durand, who both scored 24 out of a possible 28 points. This places David 14th of 39 in the Para class and Clare at 42nd of 65 in the Open class.

Daniel punches in

David - I'm suprised I did as well as I did. I think I was guessing a lot of my answers, but getting them right. I mispunched one control and if I hadn't done that I would have ended up 7th instead of 14th. I had solved 18 and 19 together and when I turned around to punch 18, I had the punch I was planning on punching at 19. Just after I punched it, I realized I'd made the mistake. I answered 19 properly.  It got hot out there.

Daniel - I thought I did much better today than I actually did. I didn't like the mapping, particularly the vegetation boundaries. I would have mapped them with the boundary symbol. Maybe it's just me. I didn't like the weather, it was too hot.

Sharon - I started out well, and then in the middle of the course I got a little bit rushed, so I missed a couple in there. It was adequate but not brilliant. Some of them were kind of clever, but others were vague. We had a timed control at the beginning and I thought I had missed one of those, but then you went to the start and got the map for the PreO and I said "Just forget about it, you've got two hours of this other stuff in front of you, you've got to seal that out of your mind." When I did finish and we had the second timed control, that one I did nail. I felt much more confident. Most were quite fun to do.

Clare - I had a pretty good time. In general I've been enjoying the terrain because it's California like. And I've done a lot of rock mapping, so that's something I have a handle on. I'm enjoying the style of the courses because it's a lot of feature identification and not a lot of other tricky stuff. I had a couple of controls where I thought I saw through a trick and I was wrong--there wasn't a trick. I felt good when I solved number 6. Most people did solve it, but it was far away with copses and trying to figure out the edge of the copses. I used a lot of time up early, so late in the course I was going fast. 

Mika rushes while Pinja Makinen
studies her way to first place

Mika - I think it was good and fair today. I'm still having a hard time adjusting to the maps. Today my problems were mostly with reading stuff that I could use to figure out elevations. I really liked the cluster at the end of the course, starting from 20 and on through 27, which were basically all one viewing station you just would move around. You ended up having to read almost everything over there to solve those problems. That was working well for me. Many people say that A controls take them the shortest amount of time. For me, A controls seem to be taking the longest amount of time because I have to read exactly where it is. I can't get a hint from "the flag is probably placed at something" and read from there. The 16/17 combination was not good for me today. Anytime there are pairs of controls fairly close to one another, if I read one wrong there is a good chance that I might get the other wrong as well. I had a mistake at the timed control. I can't count to five it seems.