Fun and challenging afternoon, some soft and tricky patches in places. For most of you these are still early days in your off road driving careers, so with the introduction of slide sloping techniques was invaluable today, skills building step by step is key to your development and learning to master the sands. Most of today's issues were caused by a lack of momentum, this comes with experience but learning to know when you keep moving, feeding power in to overcome the softer areas and remain committed to the obstacle in hand, I also noticed drivers stopping very close to the car in front, please do remember that whenever you stop, make sure your car is pointing down, its very difficult to gain momentum when you are already pointing uphill.
You also need to work on your radio discipline, its important to learn it now, ALWAYS announce on the radio ANY refusal, no matter how small, as this has a knock on effect to the rest of the convoy, a delay in position 3 or 4 for example, then knocks on to all the other positions causing the convoy to stretch out. ALWAYS say your name and your car. Remember there is no shame in getting a refusal, its not a race to recover, it is to be done clearly and safely, and if nobody knows what you are doing then this cannot be achieved. There is always help available to you so sit tight and where necessary we can assist you.
Also please remember to take your radio with you when you are outside your vehicle, obviously we cannot communicate without the radio, we had a situation today, where the driver was 150 metres from his car and the convoy was moving and his passenger was announcing the driver wasn’t there and waving cars through, this can't happen. So please ensure your radios are with you at all times.
All in all a fun afternoon, our middle bit of slide sloping and some crosses was perfectly executed and I hope you were all able to pick up some new skills. Some really good self recoveries as well, and where we did have to dig, thank you all for your team spirit and camaraderie to the task in hand.
One final point for any of you who had mechanical issues today (flags, radios or cars) or warning lights, please make sure you have them replaced/thoroughly checked before signing up for your next drives.