Planner's Comments
The PITfalls of planning tend to rear their heads during and after a competition and the pits of Tentsmuir are no exception.
I enjoyed planning in North Tentsmuir, as it is some time since I have been there and it brought back some memories of tribulations gone by. I was also old enough last year not to have had a course that went so far north so all was relatively fresh terrain. There were balances to be made. Analysis of recent SoSOL and BOF CC guidelines gave quite a wide range of distances and times. The final distances were based on SoL3 times for the forest, a judgement of who might turn up and a little bit of perception of competitor view that some distances are too long regardless of the ground speed that might be realised. Other events on the day probably took some folk away. I was not unhappy with the results and they fitted into the guidelines quite well. The yellow course was perhaps a bit short, but taking in another forest block would have been too long, so better to have the quality at shorter distance.
We suffered rather more duff SI units than normal I am told, but we did reject any that had a capacity left of > 25%, but this perhaps was not good enough. Maybe a future event might record levels prior to an event, after an event and assess the actual failures.
So, back to that pit, control 184. It was in the right place on map and ground. It was surrounded with all the features that were on the map. They were in the right place. The pit was small. The control was placed in the feature. I hit the feature first time during planning. I tackled the feature from all angles and particularly at the direct competition angle successfully (I wish this would work all the time in my races). I therefore assessed the control as difficult, but fair. Retrospectively, I would not use this feature again. I do not however believe in using features that can be seen from miles away nor do I subscribe to 'hanging high' since that accepts there is something not quite fair about a control. Orienteering is about navigation and feature recognition, not control flag spotting. The split times perhaps tell a story of success and some failure. I wonder if perhaps recovery techniques need a little reviewing. The forest block was not big with the feature being 100m or less from three different line features. The weather before and on the day was brilliant. The forest is one that all enjoyed and the String Course also enjoyed by all, young and old, especially with the views across the Tay to Broughty Ferry and Dundee. I hope it will not be long before we are back there again.
Phil Smithard
Organiser's Comments
Thank you all for coming.
Organising an event using SI timing does reduce the need for helpers on the day, and using the BOF recommended system of Master Maps before the Start seemed to go OK (that is, I did not hear any adverse comments). Placing Control Descriptions there, too, reduced the number of Registration people.
However, the SI timing does have its down sides, sometimes. As Phil points out, we did have some 8 or so Units go down, but we managed to replace them all with spares, so no competitor was affected (apart from a few who read the taped numbers on the Units!). Robin Strain reckons the cold weather may have been the cause.
We also suffered from a non-cooperative network (linking the PCs), so we could not produce complete results at the event. I had wondered why Organisers bothered with everyone filling in written slips with their details at Registration; now I know - because of the lack of network, they were an invaluable back up, allowing us to enter names into the system on the one PC while still being able to download finishers, at the same time. Thanks to Gordon Sinclair, Robert Findlay and Andrew Dalgleish who did their best to find a cure - however, a failed network connector defeated us all, so there was nothing more we could have done on the day.
A big thanks to all the helpers, to Phil Smithard for his courses, which I think you all enjoyed, and to Eric Lovet for his controlling. Further, we are very grateful to Forest Enterprise for the use of Tentsmuir Forest, and for their putting up signs guiding us into the forest.
Dave Ellison
Controller's Comments
Last updated 22/03/2004
07:48
Results processing by Dave
Ellison