Twas the night before Warmley, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring not even a mouse (except maybe Alexandra, she had eaten sugar).
Katie had decided that working full time and volunteering with Swansea Bay Orienteering Club wasn’t enough work for their summer so they decided to sign up to plan the local BOK event – Warmley and Siston Common. After a summer of ever-changing event locations, maps being redone and getting lost in many email chains, the day of the event arrived.
Alarms went off at 5.45am, an early start to set out the controls – but only after we could read a newspaper! We all loaded up into the car with all the gear, which was a bit of a tight squeeze. After 15mins wrestling gripples almost having an argument, Alexandra was abandoned at the north end of the map while Katie and Eva carried on to the event assembly – which hadn’t been opened as it should have. After a small argument with some football parents for parking on a public road (?) the school was opened and Alexandra’s organising role ramped up.
After members of BUMC arrived and began to set off on their courses, Alexandra and Katie were able to sit down, eat some food and drink water for the first time since 7am. Eva was having an amazing time manning the string course out in the cold, shivering is a sign of being warm, right?
During a lull in people going out on courses, we decided to have a battle of the University Orienteering Clubs between BUMC and UBOC – only to be pipped to the post by a 10 year old BOK member. Outside of the string course competition, we had some amazing results from BUMC members with Harry Bratcher-Howard coming third on the Blue, Harry Foord winning the Green, a full podium sweep of BUMC orienteers on the light green course and relative newcomer to orienteering Matt Lake beating some of our 2025 BUCS athletes! On that note, shout out to Luc Jersing who finally completed an orienteering course without mispunching, what an achievement…
After our BUMC members headed off home, the packing up process began with taking down an abundance of flags that BOK have for some reason? Thankfully none blew away (unlike the tents of our fellow committee members who were in Snowdonia) in the gale force wind – maybe the organiser (Alexandra…) should have looked at the weather a bit closer? After deliriously waiting for the caretaker of the school to lock up, we were finally able to rest and recover, thank goodness.
Thank you to Bristol Orienteering Klub for supporting us in the process and to all 170 participants who attended.
Hope to see you at our first training session on campus on the 18th October!
Over and out from your Orienteering Captains Eva and Alexandra :)
