At long last the 2012 motor sport season has got under way, though not in quite the way I have ever experienced ever before. A couple of weeks ago I was informed that Bristol Pegasus Motor Club (BPMC) Membership Secretary Bob Bull was looking for a navigator to take part in the January BPMC Navigation exercise. I got in touch with Bob and he kindly agreed to take me along on Friday despite the fact that I have not read an Ordnance Survey map in something approximating 4 decades, since being introduced to the modern talking route finder a couple of years ago I have rarely had use for any kind of map at all !
This event was organised on three levels Beginners which included Bob and I, Novices for those competent at reading maps who were given an additional false origin exercise, a tulip reading exercise, a map feature reading exercise and herringbone reading exercise. Finally for the Experts there were map reading, false origin, tulip not in the correct order, map feature an a herringbone exercise. I’ll come back to the more difficult exercises in a future blog.
Photo Courtesy Dick Craddy
Bob kindly came and picked me up on Friday night in his ‘daughters Mini Cooper S’ a tidy supercharged model that would be ranged against the Mazda 6 of BPMC Chairman Andy Moss with co driver Chris Goodchild (above) ,
Photo Courtesy Dick Craddy
the Peugeot 106 Rallye of Chris Thompson and Alan Dillamore …
and the Ford Fiesta driven by Martyn with his teenage daughter Katie Davies doing the co driving. We all met with the event organiser Dick Craddy at map reference 494 943 on O/S Map 162 for a 19:30 start.
Bob and I arrived at the lay-by nice and early and wondered if we might try navigating by stars on what was a clear and dark night on the Welsh Boarder.
Once everyone had arrived and signed on Dick went through some basics about not using anything other than normal driving lights, observing the highway code at all times and he warned us that the local constabulary had been informed of our presence and that we should expect to see them at anytime, before handing us our instructions. In our case a list of fifty 6,7 and 8 figure map references with questions about features we could expect to find when we reached them.
Photo Courtesy Dick Craddy
Before setting off we plotted the map references and after the first dozen I realised I had forgotten to label them so we had to start again, nothing like starting at the bottom of the learning ladder. After what must have been nearly an hour I had about half the references plotted and Bob put the Supercharged Mini in gear and off we set towards our first map reference a junction in Mynydd-bach where we had to find out how many miles the sign post to Brynbuga read before heading in the opposite direction towards Shirenewton !
So far so good but then things soon started to get complicated, somewhere between reading the map and looking for clues as to where we actually were I missed a junction and we found our selves on a single lane track facing Chris Thompson coming from the opposite direction ! Chris kindly backed up to let us pass, somehow, it still escapes me how, we managed to do a figure of 8 and ended up back in Shirenewton. Doh ! we retraced our steps and found the junction we missed, found the correct answers to the questions and headed on toward Llanvair Discoed and found the answers to around a dozen questions before deciding to call it a day and heading to the final meeting place a pub next to Tintern Abbey. Note to self not all pubs are marked on an Ordnance Survey Map as PH (Public House) or Inn.
Needless to say we did not do very well coming in well and truly last, but Bob kindly offered to redo the exercise with me in a couple of weeks. They say practice makes perfect so if all goes well we will be back for crack at the next Navigation event a little the wiser.
If you live in the Bristol area and fancy having a go at this entertaining low cost sport why not check out the Bristol Pegasus Motor Club site join the club for just £10 and give it a go. The next BPMC organised Navigation Exercise is on March 16th.
Congratulations to Andy and Chris who easily won even with a deduction for being previous winners !
My thanks to Bob for his patience and taking me along, Dick for organising the event and providing some of the photo’s for today’s blog.
Thanks for joining me on this Supercharged Map Reading Edition of ‘Gettin’ a li’l psycho on tyres’, I hope you will join me again tomorrow. Don’t forget to come back now !
