Land Nav

A couple of weeks ago we did land navigation training and testing. This is basicially where you are brought to a place in the "back country", told where you are on the map, given a list of coordinates you need to locate, and told how long you have to find them in.

It is your job to map the coordinates, plan your best route for finding all points (i.e. shortest, least amount of hills, easiest, etc.), discover which direction/asimuth (in degrees) it is to each point, discover how far each point is one from the next, and then navigate to each point using a compass and your known pace count (mine is 54 left foot falls for 100 meters).

I have done this many, many times and feel completely comfortable doing it both at night and in the day (as the test always includes both). So, I left feeling good, found all 8 of my points after covering 5.5 km or so of pretty arduous hiking terrain and assumed I had found all 8 correctly--only 5 are needed to pass. My score card was graded. I had found 3. Baloney. I found all 8. I was told that was not the case and that I would have to stay out there another 5 hours for additional training and get up again the next morning at 2:30 to retest. Baloney.

I did it and got all 8. I seriously think the grader was just messing with me. During retraining I was asked what I needed help with. My answer was, "nothing. I know what I'm doing." So, they gave me another practice paper and sent me out. I got all of those right as well. I seriously think that guy just wanted to mess with me and make me come out again early in the morning.