#9: [25-Jul-24]

#7: [03-Jan-17]

#5: [03-Aug-16]

#6: [02-Aug-16]

#4: [31-Dec-13]

#2: [28-Feb-04]

#1: [02-Jun-01]

13-Sep-2008 -- The confluence was visited in conjunction with the “Third Baltic Swiss Geodetic Science Week“. This conference was held as part of the cooperation between scientists in the field of geodesy and photogrammetry from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Switzerland. Two years ago it had taken place at the ETH Zürich, one year ago at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and this time at the Tallinn University of Technology.

After the meeting was concluded on Friday, the Swiss delegation did not return back home right away. Instead, we stayed in Tallinn one more night. On the following day, we rented a car in order to travel to Riga and fly back from Latvia’s capital on Sunday.

It was not too difficult to win my colleagues for a little deviation to a confluence while driving from Tallinn to Riga. Both, Hilmar and Tobias had never visited a confluence before and were curious of experiencing a confluence hunt.

We took off around 9:30 am from Tallinn with Tobias as the driver, Rainer as the Navigator and Hilmar as the Controller. The drive was quite uneventful. We had some light rain and counted down the distance to the confluence. After leaving national highway no.2 we followed road no.14 up to the town Kuimetsa (5 km distance). The final approach was on minor county roads until we reached the village Karitsa. We located the confluence 250 m behind the village limits of Karitsa – which is a village with only a few scattered farmhouses. The confluence is just 20 m from the road in a mixed birch and spruce forest.

Due to the dense tree canopy, our GPS receivers gave us the runaround when we tried to line-up all zeros. Even if we tried hard, at the end we didn’t get a perfect reading.

After documentation of the confluence, we continued our tip further south. We had lunch in the pleasant town Pärnu and reached Riga in the afternoon.

CP visit details:

• Distance to a road: 20 m
• Distance of parking our vehicle: 250 m
• Distance to houses: 1 km
• Time for the hike: 1 minute
• Time at the CP: 11:07 a.m.
• Driving time (distance) from Tallinn: 1:15 hours (72 km)
• Measured height: 75 m
• Position accuracy at the CP: 6 m
• Topography: flat
• Vegetation: mixed birch and spruce forest, at the ground layer horsetail, moss and fern
• Weather: cloudy, 16° C (felt temperature)
• Description of the CP: In the north-central part of Estonia, in the municipality of Rapla, 20 m into a forest. 20 m to the South of the county road between the villages Karitsa and Lau. Grazing land to the South.
• Given Name: The Swiss Baltic Confluence