Pawtuckaway Family Camping Weekend 8-10 September 2000 by Joel

Pawtuckaway 00 Pictures

(This topic is being written in December 2000, three months after the actual event. We apologize for any delay in posting the pictures and textual summary.)

Every year, the southern New Hampshire orienteering club (UNO or Up North Orienteers) holds a family orienteering/camping weekend at Pawtuckaway State Park in southern New Hampshire. This weekend event, always held the weekend after Labor Day, is one of the highlights of the orienteering yearly calendar. The entire Gould family attended this year's Pawtuckaway family camping weekend. And for the third year in a row, Daphne and I were responsible for the canoe orienteering part of the agenda.

The camping weekend is a lot of fun. It attracts a couple of hundred people, most of whom stay over Saturday night, camping in the group site at Pawtuckaway State Park. Some even show up on Friday and camp for tonight. There is orienteering on Saturday morning and Sunday morning. There is also a canoe orienteering course (more about that later), which is available for anyone to try on either day. On Saturday night, there is a Vampire-O which is a variant of a nighttime orienteering meet. And there is a dinner on Saturday night as well.

This year the family went up on Friday afternoon. Daphne went up early in order to put up the controls for the canoe orienteering meet. I came later with the kids in tow. The weather this year was wonderful, both for camping and for orienteering. We camped both nights in our usual spot, right near the pavilion in a small wooded depression.

Last year, Ben and Beth won the couple's cup, which is an award given to the related team of two orienteers who have the fastest average time per kilometer. This year, the kids made a valiant attempt but did not make it in the top three. We were forced to give up our that which had been sitting on our mantle for the last 12 months.

I ran the brown course on the first day, and came in second. As is my usual habit, I went slowly for most of the course, making good time by avoiding making any mistakes instead of running fast. On the second day, I took Beth with me and we did the orange course. No record-breaking time, but we had a lot of fun. Daphne did not run on the first day, in order to save her knee; but she and Ben ran the yellow course on the second day.

Canoe Course Results

For the third year in a row, Daphne and I took responsibility for the canoe orienteering part of the Pawtuckaway family camping weekend. A canoe orienteering meet is like a regular (foot) orienteering meet, except that most of the orienteering is done by paddling a canoe from control to control. Pawtuckaway is a good spot for a canoe orienteering meet because it has a lot of islands and potentially confusing coastline in a small area.

In past years, we had restricted the canoe orienteering meet to those areas of the coastline which were shown on the foot orienteering map. This year, with some help from Bob Walsh, we extended the map to include all of the islands in easy reach of the group camping site, and also showed the opposite shore of the lake (although we did not put any controls their). This made the canoe orienteering course more interesting since we were able to use areas of the lake which were off the map in previous years.

As always, we try to design an interesting canoe course. Good canoe orienteers know that the best scores are achieved by running whenever possible, and not paddling to every control. We try to set the course up so that there were some good choice is between paddling and running, and possibly also swimming. Our goal every year, is to make it possible for aims Coney to just be able to finish the course and under an hour. Everyone else has to decide which controls they will skip. :-)

Most of the controls for a canoe orienteering course are placed on the shore, either on the shore of the lake or on the shore of an island. This makes it possible to pull the canoe directly up to the control to punch. Sometimes, the controls are placed in the woods requiring the orienteers to get out of the canoe and orienteers somewhat overland to find control. Sometimes, even though the controls on shore, good canoe orienteers will approach it from the land side.

A Canoe-O uses a Score-O format. This means that the controls can be punch in any order, but that there is a total time limit and participants are scored based on the number of controls that they can punch in an hour. There is a penalty for coming into overtime, and ties are broken by comparing the actual time spent on the course.

This year Aims Coney and J J Cote wanted the meet, visiting all of the controls in only 47 minutes. Aims also tried course by himself (after having visited all the controls with J J) and was able to do it in just over 50 minutes. The complete results for this year's canoe orienteering meet are shown below.

This web page (http://www.gouldhome.com/Pawtuckaway00.html) was last updated on December 19, 2001. For any comments or suggestions about the site contact Daphne Gould. Contents copyright © 1999-2003 by Joel and Daphne Gould.