Hi all,

Saw this in the Courier today, of interest to Eureka, about the official naming ceremony for Woowookarung (the new Canadian Regional Park):

http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/4785367/regional-park-to-receive-its-name-next-week/

Also, the next BUNS event is on THIS SATURDAY at 11am, at Pioneer Park, off Gillies Street North heading towards the MCain Plant. Roch is setting the controls, and has promised to keep the courses interesting, without being, err, too interesting!!

A fortnight later on 29 July, I’ll set some controls on a new map I’ve put together featuring the numerous old nightcart laneways bounded by Sturt, Pleasant, Drummond and La Trobe Streets in Western Central Ballarat, plus the area around St Pats and Ballarat and Clarendon Colleges up to Victoria Park. I’m looking forward to exploring this very interesting old part of town.

For those setting future BUNS events, we’ve now got quite an extensive collection of good maps available to run events on. Additionally, following on from my little experiment with “Open Street Maps” as a basis for a BUNS map a few weeks back at Golden Point, and Mark’s use of OSM for his Brown Hill run last week, I’ve now found yet another great website, a UK one called Open Orienteering Map (http://oomap.co.uk). This uses the Open Street Maps features database, and basic Street O mapping symbols, to produce quite reasonable Street O maps anywhere in the world.

I’ll be trying this out for my BUNS event on July 29. Here’s what a typical Open Orienteering Map looks like. It’s not quite as well-finished as Roch’s fieldworked maps of course, but it’s still quite useable for a street-based BUNS run in simple terrain. This example took literally 30 seconds to make:

What’s my message here? Using this as a base, plus Google Maps and Google Street View to to explore in more detail and browse around the streets visually, it’s really, really easy to identify specific signposts, fences, power poles etc to put 20 checkpoint tapes on, then plot them on a map, all from the comfort of home. So, if anyone wants to have a go at setting a BUNS run, please let the Committee know. It takes no more than an hour to make a map and choose 20 control sites, and then it’s perhaps 1 – 2 hours on the day of the run to go around and stick the red-and-white tapes on your chosen sites. Don’t be discouraged from setting if you can’t commit to making a map or putting tapes out – other members will gladly do this on your behalf. We’d love to see some new faces having a go at setting courses for our BUNS runs!

Regards, Ian Chennell