Organisers Report

Dry, mild and no fog !

Holding an event on Christmas Eve (albeit having the kudos of being the only event in the country) had the potential to be problematic and the original plan to use Deffer Woods had to be abandoned once suitable car parking couldn’t be secured, a pre-requisite for any event in the winter months. With this in mind, we were very happy to switch to one of our favourite areas, Storthes Hall Woods. Our warm thanks are due to Terry Martin, acting for David Storrie Associates for giving us permission to use the wood at pretty short notice. Also our thanks to Huddersfield University for the use of their facilities.

Predicting the likely numbers of competitors will always be little bit of a lottery and it was great to have so many people coming to support the event.

Since the advent of e-punching, any  ‘Entry on the Day’ events put a big strain on the registration/results team as they race to get everyone’s details entered on the computer so we decided to try ‘dibber recognition’ for only the second time at an EPOC event. Other clubs seem to have mastered this process so I hope that having now succeeded at Storthes Hall we will have teased out the gremlins and can make the technology do most of the work for us in the future although on the day we hired out 45 dibbers which still required manual entry.

Wanting to avoid the complications of recycling maps, we tried to make sure the ‘pay cars’ could keep an accurate tally of entries as they gave out copies of the control descriptions. However we may have overcomplicated things a little by putting these on the website in advance as a proportion of competitors had printed them off so things didn’t quite match up but we kept a watchful eye on proceedings and after an initial very busy period, things settled down with only the green and orange courses close to exceeding our anticipated numbers.

Storthes Hall lends itself to keeping things close together and so it was relatively straightforward to maintain an overview of how the event was going. My thanks goes to everyone who helped out on the day and especially to the team leaders who ensured that everything went so smoothly. The string course proved very popular, especially with the ‘DIY’ format and I’m grateful to Paul and Amanda for putting this on yet again.

The planners Andy and Mike Thorpe were well organised and along with Charlie Adams’ expert supervision the day passed off without any real hitches with only the glitch with the finish boxes of note.

Alistair Tinto