Page updated - February 7, 2006 East Pennine Orienteering Club Royds Hall District Event 18/12/05

Planner's report

Royds Hall Wood is an old favourite of mine because the school I taught at for 27 years is only about 20 mins away. I used to run through it regularly once a week in the 80's and early 90s.

You probably saw it at its winter best. The ground was dry and the steep slopes less slippery than they would otherwise have been. I can tell you that its wonderful to run through when we've had a fall of snow.

For me the 2 best jobs in the organisation of an event are planning or doing the start. I've been lucky enough to do them both on a number of occasions. Using OCAD and SI punching has improved my computer skills and increased my enjoyment of the task.

To get you all round the wood (in the same direction) for the requisite length and difficulty of your courses required 52 control sites. In fact I slimmed down the total from nearly 60 in the final stages. One or two controls were overused because of this but putting out 50 or so SI boxes, stakes and kites on the morning of the event is no joy ride. Many thanks to Dickie and Gemma for their invaluable help and punctual arrival. (My usual team were doing an adventure race or at a BOF coaching conference!)

I hope those of you on the longer courses enjoyed the run back down the wood. It was deliberate,   I've enjoyed it many a time.

I will leave Controller Chris to comment on the White course, suffice it to say the we felt unhappy about using the NE part of the area known as Old Hanna Wood as the path system was clearly too confusing. This could still be the case in the lower wood too because of the number seasonal paths that spring up in woods used by the general public. We also felt unable to put on a string course and perhaps overlooked this in the planning of the White course.

I did my best to get you to the farthest and most interesting parts of the wood that course lengths would allow, even to the point where there were 30 controls on Brown and I still could not get it to 8.0k!

My good friend, kite collector and pre-runner of courses, James Logue   made the point that future planners should consider using a butterfly(e.g. 10,11,12, then back to 10 which is also 13:   14,15, and 16 which is both10 and 13 ) to make better use of the top end of the area. The wonders of the SI system! Nice idea James!

Thank you for coming and making it such a successful event. Thank you for your appreciative comments, you clearly enjoyed yourselves.

Thanks also to Esther, James and Rod for helping with collection. A special thanks to our security patrol of Rod and Maggie Shaw who had little to do. (last time we'd had controls vandalised so I took no chances and only put out controls on the day).

This is the first event I've ever planned where, thanks to the use of computers, I spoke to the controller face to face for the first time at 7:30am on Sunday morning!!

Needless to say emails and map files have been zipping back and forth between us for a couple of months. It was a marvellously efficient way of planning and I have   much appreciated his advice and support. Thanks Chris! You're now highly recommended for all future EPOC events!!

One final word must go to James Williams who has helped me at home, often at a moment's notice, on the finer points of SI planning particularly when it came to updating the map and exporting the control descriptions.

Ivor Noot