Fränkels Kanna (25-09-2021)

This race was the orienteering part of a military competition consisting of pistol shooting, orienteering and target designation, I started two minutes behind Henrik, the local favorite and four minutes behind my teammate Egil.
The course was very simple, but considering that the map is from 1993, that was probably a good thing!

I caught up to Egil and Henrik on the fourth control, passing them to #5 & 6 before disaster struck in the form of completely wrong vegetation mapping to #7: I started in the wrong direction because I just aimed off from the very sharp vegetation boundary which in reality was mostly north-south! Up on the second ridge we hit a big track while seeing a clearing to the south so I first thought this was the big path just west of the control, but the white forest here was in fact dark green, nearly impassable. I realized that we had to be too far north and needed to relocate on the brown clearing (which actually was a turning circle for big forestry machines & trucks. We all lost about 5 minutes on this mistake which I could have avoided if I had taken a bearing and ignored vegetation boundaries and all the paths & tracks that were missing on the map.

Ran OK to the final controls, got a gap after #9 and won the race by 3 minutes.

EDIT: With very good pistol shooting (I was lucky: In one of the 4 series I hit 6 out of 6 single-handed shots in 10 seconds, against a dinner plate sized target 25 m away!) and good map reading in the target designation exercise I won the combined competition. Together with four other team mates from NROF Oslo we got to take the silver "Kanna" back home until next year.