Essex Stragglers Orienteering Society (SOS)

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Regional Colour coded event (Level C) incorporating EAL
Writtle Forest
Sunday 2nd February 2020
Results

Officials' Comments

Organiser - Lyn West lynwestghh@gmail.com

The event seemed to go well with many complementary comments about the woods and John and Jenny's courses. It was the first outing for the SOS tent, generator and SI kit so plenty of room for error. In the end the only glitch here was the one control box with the wrong internal time mentioned below. It was left to the toilet to malfunction. My apologies for the inconvenience. The toilet company have issued a refund.

Special thanks to Mr Smith at Entire Farm who opened the parking around the fishing lake for us. We lost our usual parking in November when the bulk of the planning was done. It was a bit of a scramble to find anywhere useable for parking without excessive walks. My thanks to Eddie Banks for securing the replacement parking.

Thank you to Lord Petre for permission to use his glorious woods. As always he was incredibly welcoming and helpful.

A huge thank you to my band of helpers who ensured the smooth running of the event and to you all for coming.

Planners - John and Jenny Collyer (SOS)

Writtle is certainly an unusual forest, untouched by modern forestry practice it has large swathes of mature standard trees and coppices, leaf-strewn ground cover with little undergrowth to slow progress, very few paths, but a multitude of ditches and streams for navigation, and last but not least, the remains of WW2 training in the multitude of craters to tease at the end of the technical courses. It was a pleasure to get to know these woods and the devising of courses was easy with excellent runnability in all directions.

We would like to thank all those who helped us in the forest and make the event so successful.

Janet our Controller who carefully scrutinised our suggestions, particularly with the needs of the junior courses in an area with so few distinct paths.

Clive Tant for helping to check controls and replacing a unit in the forest when it became clear that the timing was set incorrectly.

Various club members who willingly collected in controls at the finish of the event.

And lastly, all those who took the time to come and find us and say what enjoyable courses they had run.

Controller - Janet Biggs (HAVOC)

Thankfully we were blessed with a dry day after a damp start for those of us who were setting up and checking the controls. It was a pity the heavy overnight rain left some standing water and a few extra ponds. There were a few slips and slides but thankfully no serious injuries.

The courses were ably planned by John and Jenny Collyer who made my work easy and a joy to do. We were concerned about the two most junior courses, White and Yellow, because of the lack of suitable paths. We spent a lot of time checking and rechecking. Fortunately all the youngsters successfully completed their course. It is unfortunate that there were so few competitors on these courses, particularly on the White. One problem which we did not spot until competitors on those courses began to download is that one control box, 102, had the wrong time on its internal clock. So, although competitors received the correct overall time for their course their split times were rather odd. This has been manually corrected although the leg times into 102 and out to the next control may be out by a few seconds.

As controller, it is pleasing to see that the majority of competitors completed their course and most people seem to have enjoyed the very good open forest with little or no undergrowth. A few people did mis-punch but, all for different reasons, which to me, means individual errors rather than planning oversights. We received a lot of compliments about the courses and thank you to everyone who took part and especially to those who gave us feedback.

On behalf of the competitors, thanks to Lyn and her team for organising and sorting out the car parking after the original car parks were unusable. And, of course, to John and Jenny for planning and Clive for helping me check controls on the day.

Par Times

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