January (08) Night Navigation Exercise

Well, January was our turn to organise a Night Nav and with the regular crews expressing their view that they didn’t like crawling around doing 10mph looking for hard to find symbols, we decided to try and come up with something different but within the current Night Nav Regulations.

Once the route was decided upon the next was how are we going to keep the crews interested. First the instructions would state that the symbols would be within 100 metres of any given junction on the route, then we threw in 9 not as map junctions, hopefully this would keep the competitors thinking all evening. Next route instructions, instead of the regular 6 figure map references we thought something different was needed to get the brain power working, which probably wasn’t welcome on a Friday night after a hard weeks work. So we came up with a mixture of grid lines, spot heights and a circular herringbone.

There was certainly a look of horror on the faces of Novices when they first looked at the route instructions.

But after explaining the method of working the route out to them they seemed much happier and we reassured them that they would get as much help as they needed if they got stuck all they had to do was ask and they did.

The experts where less fortunate though, because if they needed help they would have to pay for it in the form of 30 penalty points, but they all managed without taking penalties.

The symbols where easy to see with out of bounds and bogus symbols also out to try and catch crews out.

The route took crews from Rhuallt in a clockwise loop up to Trelawnyd, Whitford, Caerwys and then down to the finish at the Pwll Gwyn.

Most seemed to enjoy it with 1^st overall navigator Osain Hooson remarking it was good to do a Night Nav where I had to think all evening and I didn’t loose interest half way through.

Well done to newly promoted expert crew Stuart Thomas and Osian Hooson on finishing 1st overall.

Stuart & Derek Jones.