What a memorable day! The first official orienteering event in southwest Florida attracted perfect weather and a small but enthusiastic group of mostly first time orienteers.
Capt Mike Farley and the students of the Charlotte High School NJROTC team provided flawless support, pre-running the courses, handling registration and timing and efficiently picking up the controls and cleaning up the event area. They also recruited NJROTC schools that hadn’t previously been involved in orienteering to try their hand. Welcome to Venice, Lemon Bay and Port Charlotte High Schools.
Based on this experience I highly recommend that FLO work with their JROTC partners to sign up interested schools to provide the logistic support for many of the future FLO events. Charlotte students provided all the registration, timing and control pick up for this event. Along with Capt Farley they were also able to pre-run the courses and provide valuable advice to this outsider about changes that had to be made to their courses. One of their parents, Raymond Keen, was also very helpful in that last regard.
In addition to the student resource I was able to try a few other departures from regular FLO practices. The courses were renamed from standard color coding to names I thought would be more self-explanatory. I used Leisure, Intermediate and Adventure and then at the last minute added a Long Intermediate. Each course was given a map scale that allowed me to fill the page, improving readability for the less experienced orienteers. I also dispensed with the symbolic clue sheets or control descriptions judging that to be less important than learning about the relation of the map to the terrain. The terrain actually determined the third departure from the norm. The courses very much emphasized map reading over compass work. Many participants finishing their courses said they had not had to use their compass at all. As the mapper that made me very happy.
All the students and many of the ‘civilian’ groups participated as teams thus cutting down on the length of the result list but all in all there were close to 70 participants out in Punta Gorda for a great day.
Of the 28 group and individual starts there was only one DQ, and that was an experienced orienteer who knew she had accidentally left out a control. She was just very happy with the chance to be orienteering which she practiced many years ago in the Philadelphia area before retiring to Charlotte County.
On the Adventure Course special note should go to Kris Mante who came all the way from Winter Springs for the event. Also to Brent Henzi and his group who averaged just over 10 min/km for the course set partly in the wild and partly through parks and neighborhoods. James Nici, his young son and a friend (Raise the Bar) also made an impressive debut to the sport at the Adventure level.
As a memento of the event, all participants received a certificate honoring the completion of their course. The certificate was a photo of a control marker in the park terrain overlaid with some words of congratulations.
Sorry if this report is going on too long but I want to thank Bob Putnam and FLO for making the event equipment available. I particularly like the FLO one-piece registration/waiver/control card. It is the best and most efficient record keeping I’ve seen after orienteering in many different parts of the continent. I will be stealing a card to send home to Ottawa to encourage its use.
Finally a big thank you is owed to Charlotte County Community Services for allowing this new activity in their park.
Gord Hunter
Event Director
| Name | Time |
| Brent Henzi +2 | 80:33 |
| Team Warburton | 101:00 |
| Raise the Bar (Nici) | 103:12 |
| Kris Mante | 109:05 |
| Name | Time |
| Old Guys | 38:50 |
| Jaguar 2 | 50:40 |
| Trazy Acuff | 54:18 |
| Jaguar 4 | 56:43 |
| Jaguar 5 | 65:20 |
| CHS Krazy Katie | 76:45 |
| Jaguar 1 | 93:43 |
| Jaguar 6 | 100:43 |
| Name | Time |
| Lemon Bay HS 1 | 23:22 |
| Lemon Bay HS 2 | 27:00 |
| Venice HS 2 | 54:07 |
| Venice HS 1 | 88:10 |
| Port Charlotte HS | 93:44 |
| Name | Time |
| Lemon Bay HS 4 | 13:42 |
| Lemon Bay HS 1 | 21:55 |
| Lemon Bay HS 5 | 21:11 |
| Lemon Bay HS 3 | 23:12 |
| Lemon Bay HS 6 | 24:04 |
| Venice HS 1 | 25:52 |
| Blue Phoenix | 26:31 |
| Lemon Bay HS 7 | 28:44 |
| Blakes | 29:31 |
| Dr Chewies | 58:10 |
| Rosie | DQ |
| DNF | Did Not Finish |
| DQ | Disqualified (Missed Controls) |
| OT | Over 3 Hour Time Limit |