Tom’s top ten tips for Navigation

In adventure racing, if your team has a weak point, make sure it is not navigation. You can lose 30 minutes over an 80km mountain bike section because you are not quite as fast. But in a 10km orienteering section you can quite easily lose 2 hours by getting lost. So to get you up to speed in navigation here are my top 10 tips:

Don’t get lost. If you do don’t tell anyone.
The only way to learn how to not get lost is to get lost. The key to navigation is practise. Go in every orienteering and rogaining event you can find. When first starting out you will make mistakes. But making these mistakes will be the most useful learning experiences.
Always trust your compass. I have only ever come across 1 magnetic anomaly in the ground which caused the compass needle to point east instead of north. Don’t follow your gut feeling as to the direction to go if it is not what the compass bearing says.
Always know where you are on the map. Follow the features on the map. For example note the gully to the east of you, the hill to the west, cross the creek etc.
Periodically check the features that you come across by orientating your map and ensuring that what you find on the ground exactly matches the map. For example the checkpoint might be located in a creek that runs north-south. You hit a creek on the way to the checkpoint and think it might be the right creek. However if you orientate the map correctly you will realise that the creek you are in runs to the north-east. So it can’t be the creek where the checkpoint is.
Be careful that your bearing is not 180 degrees out. This can be easy to do when you take your bearing and rotate the compass dial so that the lines on the dial are pointing south on the map rather than north. You can also make the mistake of taking a bearing that is 45 degrees out. This happens when you align the compass dial lines with the east –west map lines.
Make sure you are following the map from the right checkpoint. A common mistake is forgetting which checkpoint you are at and in your haste setting a bearing from a checkpoint marked on the map that you are not actually at. For example you have just come in to checkpoint 12 and then start moving off as if you are going from checkpoint 13 to 14 instead of 12 to 13.
There are 2 ways to follow a bearing. One is to hold the compass in front of you so that you can see the direction of the needle and constantly look at the compass to ensure it stays orientated and that you are heading in the right direction. Usually this is the only option at night. The other way is to align your compass and pick a feature in line with the bearing and head towards that. The feature may be a tree that is only 10 metres away or a headland that is a few kilometres away.
Be careful about relying on tracks. There will often be unmarked tracks that you will come across and tracks marked on the map which no longer exist. To combat this you must know where you are at all times. On a bike use a combination of an odometer and orientating your map as you go so you can mentally tick off corners in the track, read the terrain (up hills and down hills) and watch for features.
Make sure you know the scale of the map and the contour intervals.
Estimate your speed of travel. This is very important when there are no features or you can’t see them. A common mistake is that you think you have travelled further than you really have.

Well there you are – you got an extra tip for free!
See you out there in the bush.

Tom Landon-Smith
Team AROC