Essex Stragglers Orienteering Society (SOS)

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East Anglian Orienteering Association (EAOA) CompassSport Cup and Trophy Level B regional qualifying round Hatfield Forest Sunday 8th May 2016 Prelininary results

Officials' comments

Organiser - Eddie Banks (SOS) banksy.eddie@gmail.com

Hatfield Forest was in wonderful condition for our EAOA Compass Sport event. Quite a contrast to the original March date, when we were declined access permission because of the waterlogged ground. The 26°C and full sun made the day very pleasurable, if a little challenging while running. The sweat-proof maps performed well.

Many thanks to the National Trust for allowing us to use the forest, to the Mugele family at Marston Farm for the excellent parking field and barn, to Hassall and Lucking for the map printing, Fabian4 for the pre-entry service and to Luxury Toilet Hire (UK) for the mobile toilets.

Thanks to Michael Chopping of NOR for keeping us all on the 'straight and narrow' and to Neil Humphries (WAOC) for the excellent course planning. Neil can probably justify a new pair of shoes on expenses given the miles he covered both early and late in the day! Thanks also to Kevin Machin, of SOS who has put in a huge number of hours of his own time, re-surveying and updating the map. Thanks from me, especially to Paul Beckett for managing the complete pre-entry and EOD process, which takes a huge load off the organiser. Thank you too to the many volunteer helpers from HAVOC, SUFFOC and SOS, without whom the event would not have been possible.

I will echo Michael's apology to the early starters. We had one customer for minor first aid. Otherwise things seemed to run very smoothly, though it did take us a while at the end to convince ourselves we hadn't lost anybody! Thanks to Tony Biggs for his invaluable support in this.

I think we have now sorted out most of the 'wrinkles' in the results. Please let me know if you spot anything else that doesn't look right! Congratulations to the winning teams.

This was the first time for me as organiser for a level B event, so thanks to all those of you who guided me on the way.

Planner - Neil Humphries

Controller - Michael Chopping

Well Hatfield was different on the event day, from the lake pretending to be forest I visited earlier in the year, every path, track and in fact off into the wood was very wet with most tracks un-runnable even in studs. But as you saw Hatfield dried out nearly everywhere, in the last two weeks. So the wait for the event was worth it.

Neil made the best of the thinned light green to allow straight line navigations on nearly all of your legs, and with Kevin's updated map showing the vegetation changes allowing you to know where you could get through.

Sorry to the small number of early runners who had their start messed up I hope we sorted it all out for you. The start team worked really hard to get you all through as quickly and smoothly as possible.

As with the proverbial swan the event had some things going on in the back ground that hopeful none of you saw, but needed sorting out, thanks Eddie for a level headed approach to all the problems and a well done to the entry and SI teams for working through the hi-cups and a special thank you to Tony for stepping in to sort out the system so we could be assured you had all returned and finished. Just a note to those of you who ran on a different dibber to the one you register this causes a lot of real issues when we are trying to find out who is still running, but only takes a few second to change in the system if you let us know.>

It takes a lot of sorting for a region to put an event on and I believe EAOA did you all proud with a great CSC heat, Congratulation to the winning teams, good luck at the finals.

Preliminary results

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