Rogaining School's Cup
There’s nothing more exhilarating than a five o'clock start in the middle of winter, but the sight of frozen dew turning fields of grass white was worth the effort. It was our substitute for snow on our trip to Fryerstown north west of Melbourne. Our school was a competitor in the School’s Cup, the rogaining course run by the Victorian Rogaining Association. This competition allowed teams five hours to locate as many checkpoints as possible in over 30 square kilometers of barely tamed Australian bush land. With our school’s 54 competitors portioned into 19 teams, preparations were made and teams were ready soon after arrival. Points are racked up by finding a checkpoint with their value being based on the difficulty to find it using an old fashioned compass and a map. And indeed some of these checkpoints are difficult! In my team of two we easily found the first checkpoint but an hour later we gave up searching for our second. We learned later that the checkpoint we searched for was three gullies over when our map only indicated two gullies in the entire area! We weren’t the only ones mislead by our maps, when you are out in the wild everything is bigger and rougher than you expect. You can forgive the team who turned up at the finish an hour late. With watercourses without water, and not knowing if you just reached the track here on the map, or that one, it is easy to get lost.
This course turned out to be the most difficult and the lowest scoring for the last few years because checkpoints were further away from the start, this is why we all arrived exhausted, dirty, and very grateful for the feast the volunteers prepared for us. Congratulations to our winners in the mixed division and runners up in the girl’s and boy’s division.
This fabulous experience would not have been possible without the amazing and organised teachers who trained us. Thank you Ms Bourke, Mr Machin, Mr Zachest, Ms Mauger, Ms Roden, Ms Greenwood and our ex student Ben Levin.
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