Event Information

Watchtower – Multiday distance forest event– Saturday 8 April

Course #	Grade/course	Indicative Length (km)	# controls	Scale
1	M21E/M20E	6.1	16	1:10,000
2	W21E/W20E	5.2	16	1:10,000
3	Red long	4.9	15	1:7,500
4	Red medium	4.0	12	1:7,500
5	Red short	3.0	13	1:5,000
6	Orange	3.5	11	1:7,500
7	Yellow	2.3	13	1:5,000
8	White	1.5	11	1:5,000

Hazards: usual hazards associated with forest orienteering – rough underfoot with occasional branches. Watch out for branches at eye height – consider wearing safety eyewear.

Whistles are strongly recommended for the forest events, as is wearing clothing suitable for the weather on the day.

Directions

Drive to Waitarere Beach, go straight on at the roundabout at the edge of the village. The event is in the forest through the access on the right shortly after the roundabout, but see the parking note …

Parking

No competitors cars inside the gate. Please park considerately in the surrounding streets – note there is quite a lot of parking on Achilles Ave (next left past the forest entrance).

Event Centre

The event centre is approx. 100 metres inside the forest gate on Waitarere Beach Road. Start and Finish are adjacent to the event centre. There will be a coffee cart and Portaloos at the event centre. Further toilets are available at the surf club at the beach end of Waitarere Beach Rd

Mappers Notes

The area we call “Watchtower” was mapped and used in the 90s before being logged. We transferred our attention further north before coming back in 2022. Some things are the same but a lot is different – in particular a rise in the water table, creating some large swamps. We list here some background to our current mapping and hope it will increase your enjoyment.

From east to west there are three zones. The eastern third has been thinned fairly cleanly – possibly the thinnings taken out for posts. There’s a bit of slash, and we’ve mapped it as wide green stripe (good visibility). Machines have made a LOT of tracks in this process. We HAVEN’T mapped them because there are so many and they fade in and out. They are going to disappear in time.

The middle third hasn’t been thinned yet. There are decaying prunings on the ground and reduced visibility. Last year we called it light green, this year we have reclassified most of it as white. With plenty of contour features, this is in really nice condition at present. We’re mostly in these two zones, with only C1 going into the western third.

The western third is a mixture. There’s a number of marshes, mostly impassable. During the winter the water level rises, in summer it falls. There are zones where you can pass (perhaps with wet feet) into a fairly narrow but passable macrocarpa strip. Beyond that there’s a thick barrier of a dense shrub which prevents getting out onto the beach.

The maze of tracks that used to be there was lost in the logging, and there’s only one significant walking/biking track now. We’ve only got the forest road pattern, and some roadside clearings for log handling. This makes it hard to set white, yellow and orange courses, but perfect for red😊 We’ve provided white and yellow with taped routes.

The large uncrossable marshes don’t have a black line round them as the edge is a bit moveable. Often there’s a rim of thick vegetation there anyway. We rarely use the “fight” green except for piles of logging stumps etc. We’ve used medium green for everything that’s no use for orienteering – and probably haven’t been inside it.