Some Ski-O Photos

top heavy on skis

Sam Kane - The secret of our success

Matt and La - champions again

Ski-O happens once a year in New Zealand. July sometime on the Waiorau Snowfarm - Pisa Range - Wanaka. We try to get there when we can. Fortunately there are not many good ski orienteers in New Zealand and Penny and I are occasionally able to slip onto the podium...a particularly worthy achievement in my case as someone that can hardly stay upright on ski's - though I'm slowly getting better with a practice day most years!

This year the format was a three hour teams event. We teamed up with ski-o first timer Sam Kane, a cousin of Penny's who farms the Glenfoyle station near Luggate. It quickly became apparent Sam was the star of our team and he became the official check point visitor while we preceeded to cut as many corners as we could. Matt Scott and Lara Prince were our major rivals, well major stumbling blocks to success. With their North American and Swedish cross country skiing backgrounds they basically blew us away. But through sheer perseverance, courage and cunning we did hold onto second..

The fun of orienteering

We've been orienteering for a while now, and all to often it gets all too serious, so its fun to kick back and do something low key on a sunny day in a beautiful place somewhere new. Thats what we got up to last night over in Seatoun on the edge of the Harbour entrance, where you can sit on a big sandy beach and gaze over at the forested Hutt valley. Fellow elite orienteer Lizzie Ingham one of the organisers for the evening had the same idea...

Lisa Eagle was down from Hastings, where she lives the pampered wife of a local optometrist. Lisa's given up the pretense of been an athlete now (unlike us...we stick with the pretense) but she used to be damn good. You know the older you get the better you were! But nah, she seriously was a talent and Penny and I were both lucky to be in the same team as her for Junior World Champs, me in 1999 (Bulgaria), Penny in 2000 (Czech Republic). And we got her back out there, heres the evidence.

I have a real soft spot for old war time gun emplacements and home guard sort of relics. So it was great to rise from the streets and school of Seatoun onto the wild slopes of Point Dorset where eyes once scanned the harbour entrance for lurking dangers from concrete bunkers. Penny scrambled down into one to clip the checkpoint and the girls posed by the graffitied wall (unfortunately the camera shook).

We sprinted off (well sort of) down the windswept ridge with the Interislander chugging out of the harbour. It wasn't far back to the finish, the greasy groper and fish n chips on the beach.