Night Navigation Practice Part 1

Emma and I headed out to have a quick calibration of our pacing for an upcoming night navigation team event. It's important to get your pacing right in night navigation, knowing how far you've traveled is essential when you can't get as many clues from the environment at night.

The basic pacing method is to know how many steps it takes to cover 100m. This can then be easily counted again and again or part counted to fairly reliably calculate how far you've covered.

Lots of things affect the length of your stride like speed, terrain underfoot, gradient, tiredness, load carried, etc. However as I hadn't got any idea what my pacing was I needed to send myself off to be calibrated.

I'd measured a couple of courses on Where's The Path so we checked our pacing for a walk and a steady jog (we won't be going any faster than this).

As usual, I had packed the spreadsheets 8-)

First was a trot up and down the path at the back of mine and then up into a slightly steeper field to see what effect gradient had. Then we drove up to Ilkley Moor for a bit of flat but boggy and heathery path to see what effect the terrain had.

Next we need to do some work on steep heathery slopes with little to no path as that is the expected terrain underfoot for the event. Afterwards some point to point nav work would be good along with a longer trip out with the correct scale of map. We've only got a few weeks to prepare properly so better get cracking lad!