We had a great time at our first School ARDF event at Carolina North Forest. There was a bit of drizzle in the air, but mostly it was dry. Four teams went out to search for foxes. In total, we had nine participants (ten if we include the beagle).
We were a little late in getting started. This was our first time setting a full course (5 foxes + homing beacon) and we encountered several unexpected delays. Fox #1 wasn't ready when participants started going out. This created much confusion with the timing at the start but we did get fox #1 out a half hour later. In the end, every fox was found by at least one of the teams.
Kudos to all the participants who went on the hunt. Only one participant had been in the Enrichment Club ARDF and only one team had been at the demonstration event the previous Saturday. So, in the class preceding the hunt, they were exposed to much more information than anyone could process in one sitting. But they all went bravely out. In the end, everyone came back in good cheer. And, although we had set a 90 minute time limit, most teams stayed out longer in an attempt to get one more fox.
Results
Participants are listed in order of registration. The finds are the controls found: foxes 1 through 5 and home (H). The time is the time spent on course.
| entry # | participants | finds | time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kelly Fan, Emily Huang | 1 4 3 H | over time |
| 2 | Otto Kinder-Moore, mother Tina Moore | - | did not finish |
| 3 | Ethan Rayala, father Brian Rayala | 2 3 H | 1h13' |
| 4 | Rainey Sellars, younger syster, father Allen Sellars | 2 5 H | over time |
Pictures
Clicking on the pictures below will bring up the original full-sized version of the image.
Sorting equipment at the Outdoor Classroom after returning from the hunt.
Left to right: Ethan, Ethan's father; and Mrs Sears - a happy crew after a good time in the woods.
At left, Otto and his mother. At right, Rainey, his younger sister, and their father.
We even had a fox-hunting beagle participate!
Left to right: Emily and Kelly, exiting the finish shoot just after ringing the finish bell.
Mrs. Sears, Emily, and Kelly; putting stuff away after the event.
All the original pictures can be downloaded as a single tarball here (14.5 MB): 20160430-pictures.tar.gz. 2016-05-30 download problems discovered: When I right-click the link and choose 'save-as', the downloaded file ends up with extra bytes and fails to unpack. This happens with the GoDaddy server but not on our home server. I don't understand why this is happening. I'm leaving the file up because downloading it with wget does work.