Making Southern areas hard

[SeanC]

Things didn't go so well for me at today's event at Friston. At the start flag I twiddled my fairly new Silva thumb compass to take what I anticipated would be a series of bearings to the controls. But the needle was completely stuck. No bubble, just stuck. I've never seen this in 40 years of orienteering. No amount of shaking could shift it. As I had only just made the last start, there was no time to get a spare so I had the choice of:

a) abandoning the course and going back home in a huff
b) doing the course anyway.

I went for option b and it was surprisingly enjoyable. Of course my time was more rubbish than normal, but without the compass I found myself aiming off and pacing more, and using these brown swiggly lines that were on the map. It was a... challenge.

At the end of the course my son gave the compass a proper teenage shake, and now it is fine.

I've got two questions:
a) What's happened with my compass? Is it going to stick again?
b) What would people think about 'no compass' courses? Making courses technically harder. Do any clubs do this?

[Atomic]

I've had a cheap chinese (not Silva) compass fail like that. I directed it out of interest and it looked like the point the needle rotates around was slightly damaged/corroded/badly finished.

In terms of make courses harder - you can chose to put the compass away anytime you want and treat it as a training exercise. I guess a group of friends in a club could elect to do it for fun at the same time. I'm not sure its something that you really want to encourage (not least because having a working compass is useful to stop people getting horrendously lost, or help them find their way to safety). One thing some of our local coaches have done for training is remove all the paths from a map to force you to use different techniques - that's something that might help make some areas harder - and isn't switching off some key TD4/5 skills.