Background

Carol Fowler and Stuart Payne had done quite a few foot rogaines together, when Carol, who is also an endurance event horse rider, prevailed on Stuart to help her organise a rogaine for teams on horseback. This resulted in the first Equestrian Rogaine being held on 1 April 2012, and since then a further four have been held up to June 2015. A total of 259 riders have taken part in the five events with 48 of them having done more than one. The two best attended (96 & 90) have both been held near Springfield on hill farmland on opposite sides of SH73. Other than the third rogaine, held on a smallish map at Whitecliffs when the time limit was 2.5 hours, they have each been of 3-hour duration. It has been hard to assess how much ground will be covered, but as the teams can seldom red-line between checkpoints, principally because of fences, but also because of steep banks, rough vegetation and deep creeks, it has been less than a foot rogainer might expect.

In the first event, all checkpoints were visited but no team got them all. However, in the four since then a team has done so each time; the same team in events 4 & 5. And this despite the setting of some dead-end controls. Where at all possible controls, have been placed so they can be clipped without the rider having to dismount. Hence many have been on a tree. In the main, the navigational challenge has been kept relatively simple, working along and near 4WD trails and other tracks. The more trails that can be incorporated into the planning, the greater the strategic challenge that can be provided. As with foot rogaines, there is always more than one option from the start.

Teams have not been permitted to jump the fences, so a feature of the maps has been that all relevant fences have to be shown, and a new ‘topo’ symbol for gates has been introduced, namely a purple cross (X).

The other two innovations from conventional rogaining that have been introduced have been (1) starting procedure and (2) size of teams. When a large number of horses, unfamiliar with each other, are brought in close proximity, they can become quite nervous. So for the first two events, teams were started in five minute waves. But since then, teams have been started in a half-hour period when they are ready, whereupon their start time has been written on their clip card. (It also means you don’t have teams ‘thundering’ into the finish all at the same time. )

At the first event (Annavale), teams of 2 to 5 were accepted but the observation was that teams of five were quite unwieldy, and so since then team size has been restricted to 2 to 4.

Bill Kennedy has put the relevant topo maps into OCAD (Orienteering Computer Aided Design) for us for further editing and Dave Laurie has then done the cartography for each event map. Carol's husband John Gagliardi has organised prizes for each event.

 

The event planning team