Thread: Hihitahi Challenge 2014

Couple more:

Congrats Gillie on what appears to have been a successful event. Not easy been the organiser and is gauged by the smiles and positive feedback. Well done

Looks like a great weekend, I'm gutted I only just saw this thread as would have been keen to tag along, maybe next year...

Yes, another great day thanks to Gillie and the many wonderful people who helped him run it.

The unique challenge this time was estimating the longer ranges by eye. If you got it real close, you hit. If not, the grass just soaked it up.

I'll remember the "TINK" from one particular little green plate way up the hill for a long time.

Here is one of the shooting stations. We fired from the tree at bottom left and targets were scattered all up the grassy face to the right, with the last one being on the farm track at the top.



The navigation and fitness test wasn't too onerous this time but, knowing Gillie's propensity to invent tricky shooting scenarios, he's bound to have something meaty for the buck rats to get into on the next one. There were some good scores on the tree identification and binocular observation stages. Who would have thought it would take 10 minutes to spot a shotgun hanging on a bush ?

Cheers for the comments guys,

I have been going through the results over the last day or so and have come up with a few modifications. I'll use the next few posts to show some of those observations. There were six basic components to the event: movement, navigation, distance judging, shooting, tree ID and observation. I will ignore the movement scores as most people found themselves stopped at shooting stages and this affected their movement score.

The longest time taken by any competitor earned that competitor some AA batteries to keep their torch going when they are walking home in the dark

Overall the results were not as good as i expected.

Navigation: Based on the results I don’t think many people are competent with determining a magnetic bearing from a map. We gave everyone the magnetic variation but not how to use it.

Overall the navigation scores were very low – highest score was 3 from 5 bearings, most people didn’t get any.

One of the bearings was to an object they could see… all they had to do was line their compass up on it and read the bearing. Only two people recorded a bearing here within the accuracy limits we set.

Given the distances involved with the magnetic bearings we asked for most people walking on the bearings they estimated would not have even been close to arriving where they wanted. Worst navigation score got a $2 compass as a prize – to practice with!

Distance judging: Again results were lower than I expected. The average score was only 10 out of 24 and only two competitors got a score over 15.

The average estimate deviation from the actual distance was 18% of the actual distance.

Interesting where the target was placed up a slope from the competitor they generally overestimated the distance to it. Where the target was placed below the competitor or across a gulley they generally underestimated the distance to it.

Worst distance judging score received a 3m measuring tape to practice with!

Shooting: Ouch… all I can say is Ouch… We set the shooting up as what we thought was easy. 15 of the 20 shots were able to be shot lying down off a daypack or a bipod.

Highest score was 12 from 20, average score was 7. I think the distance judging got most people though and this meant they over thought the shooting. I said going in that someone shooting a “standard” hunting calibre, using a 200m zero and aiming straight at the targets would do alright.

There were people who were more than 100m out on their distance estimate that still hit the target. There was a lot more people that estimated the distance within 50m and they still missed.

Worst shooting score got a toy spud gun and a spud to practice with.

Tree ID: The results here were about what I expected. Some people knew their trees, some people took a tree identification book with them, some people did not know their trees at all.

The average competitor correctly identified 6 from 8 different trees.

Observation: This stage was a huge success I thought. A lot of competitors mentioned to me how much fun they had looking for “hidden” item on the slope in front of them.

I never actually got a chance to sit down and do this stage. I did talk with Malcolm about the 30 minute time limit though. Surely it wouldn’t take 30 minutes to identify 10 items… As it turned out there were only a few people that got all 10 items and they used just about all their time doing so.

Worst observation score got a $2 set of toy binoculars to practice with.

Sounds like a well planned and well run event!

Well, it has taken me quite a while to put this video together. There was about 6 hours of footage to work with. Most of it from the day of the event but also some taken while planning and setting the course. My article is being printed in the next NZ Guns and Hunting Magazine due out the end of this coming week. With this in mind i thought i had better get round to finally finishing the video.



I have had a lot of feedback about this event from those that attended. Most of the feedback has been very good - the rest has been very constructive. Looks like we will be giving this event another go next year with a few improvements / changes.

Nice work Gillie it showed just how good a day it was and you can see everyone enjoyed it.
Cheers for posting a well put together vid.

Jasen

Nice work Simon
Looks like @Philipo had a rifle that goes at that one

Excellent video !!!!!