Jon Sutcliffe and Thor Egerton. Open Mixed winners.
This event came around quickly. It was only 6 months ago that we last had an Australasian Rogaining Champs, then held in WA. On that occasion, we had come away with rather more than we expected. Aiming to just defend our Mixed Super Vets title, we came away with three trophies - the Mixed Super Vets plus Mixed Veterans & Mixed Open titles. It was the rogaining equivalent of “doing a Bradbury”. The perennial winners of these titles David Baldwin & Julie Quinn didn’t race, with Juile sidelined by injury. Other notable mixed teams also hadn’t entered. We had to work hard for the score of course but we knew we weren’t in the same league as some of these absent teams.
Six months later and we had wrestled the three trophies by car, plane, plane, hotel and car to the Snowy Mountains area. Julie & David were again out of the running to get the X and XV titles back as they were the setters and organisers of this event. But there was strong field and the maximum entry limit of 400 had been reached. There was also a very strong mixed super vets category (particularly from Tasmania with Simon and Karen, and Bernard and Sara entered), so we knew winning even one category was going to need a big effort out there.
The area was tough - few quick track routes, lots of thick bush and a very warm start on the Saturday. Maybe all this helped us - we drew on our experience and we decided on a fairly conservative plan - just 65km (straight-line) for the 24 hours, and focussing on the highest pointers.
For the first 6 hours we were on track and all was going well. We were on schedule at 4km/h (about 24km clocked) and had been through some nice country. We expected to slow after 6pm to about 3km/h and a bit slower still after dark. But when we hit the bush at about 6.30pm, we found it very tough. We stumbled through 58-96-105-74-86 (about 5km in total), found them cleanly but took 2.5 hours. We arrived at Water2 about 9pm and significantly behind our plan and with a big climb up into the bush ahead of us. This was no longer an option - we just didn’t have the will to bushbash uphill again. We knew we had to adjust the plan.