Today was our very first Ab Inito held in the afternoon and we had record 30 drivers attending, most people were on time and the vibe was realy positive.

We did the usual club introduction with Marko explaning the philosophy. We then started getting to know each other and of course covered the golden rules of safe driving the DF way with Dessert Fellas equipment checklist done at the end.

After ab initio introducing and evaluating the drivers, we officially started our first rides. This is where our drives usually begins.
The group then split into 3 according to driving experience

Prospects
After a safety briefing, traction aids turned off, convoy order and radio check done we started moving with Chefmarc in the lead Karen as 2nd and Preggy as sweeper support.
The prospect really surprised us with how quickly they picked up the lessons and with very few stucks and some textbook recoveries we had a few minutes to play. I’m really proud of their discipline and I can tell these prospect will learn quickly.

The flowing two rides were deir driving style and compare it to the existing driving discipline at Desert Fellas.

Junior’s
After defining the convoy sequence we started moving to the small slopes to warm up. After that we entered a more technical area where we had several second tries and a few recoveries.
After assessing the time available until sunset I decided to re-route in order to get to the exit before sunset. Unfortunately we had a tire pop out in a tricky ditch which consumed some time to figure we could not fix it. We decided on replacing with spare tire and I took the easy route towards the exit. One more stuck and 3 more second tries later we reached the exit with 16 km on the odometer.

Thanks everyone for joining this trip.

Thanks Alex for the second lead and thanks Pradeep and Sid for the support today.

Offroaders
After warming up, we switched to cresting on smaller and medium sized dunes with sharp drops. Then we combined them with climbing and lowering. Sharper turns where we force track tracking and eventually drive in 2×4 mode.

What we have noticed is that in some cases some drivers still struggle with gravity, lack of control in certain terrain, uncontrolled jumps and the like.
Furthermore, some new colleagues did not realize that we were trying to keep the radio line clean while driving, so they used it for fun.
We also had convoys overtaking, although this was repeatedly stated as an undesirable act.

All riders met the offroader level criteria.

Considering that the first ride is to our colleagues, we believe that they will catch our ride system already, and have fun without bending our basic rules.

I especially want to commend Rathica as a second lead and Salouh as a sweeper for exemplary teamwork and a fantastically accomplished task.

Thank you to each one of you who joined and welcome to the DF club. We look forward to you joining us in future.

To all the supports Marko and Tiago I’m very grateful for all your help today 🙏

Please rate and share some feedback below from your experience today.