Page updated - October 25, 2009 East Pennine Orienteering Club

 

Planner’s comments

Today should have had you all tackling the tussocks of Marsden Moor but unfortunately due to it being too overgrown back in the August we were faced with cancelling the event or finding an alternative so it was pleasing to have such a good turn out at our alternate event today.

Newmillerdam admittedly isn’t the most technical of areas but has some lovely bits of woodland which I tried to make the most of, whilst the more junior courses still a good path network to work their courses around. We hadn’t had a brown course at Newmillerdam so it was nice to be able to fit on it what is quite a small area and given the times (albeit with about 3 minutes knocked off for the first leg on Green-Brown) I think we got the distances about right on each of the courses. Having been in the woods several times since the end of August when the foliage was at its height, in the last week or so Autumn has definitely arrived and really improved the runnability which I hope you all enjoyed. 

It all started very well and with the help of Emma Harrison, all the controls were out and checked by the controller in plenty of time on was a very pleasant morning and I was looking forward to enjoying the spectacle of watching everyone crisscross the area. Unfortunately the start box failure which became apparent as the first finishers on Green to Brown downloaded at about 11.30 and the report of smoke and a fire up between controls 111 and 100 at about the same time meant I spent most of the next hour or so retrieving the start box and trying to deal the fire which was slowly smouldering away in the subsoil since a recent camp fire and had spread across an area, 9 m across. Thank you to the lady who alerted me to the fire and although it hadn’t been caused by orienteers, if we hadn’t been running the event today the damage would have been much more serious without our intervention. Last week I rescued a deer that had been caught up in some fencing at the Compass Sport Finals while this week I was playing fireman so you can never say orienteering is dull.

Thank you to my controller, Chris Dicken, for all his sound advice and patience in dealing with my novice planning. Also many thanks to everyone who helped out during the day to and especially to Emma for her assistance in both putting out and collecting controls, Bob who transported all the kit and the caravan, Dave who brought the farthest controls in, Guy for co-ordinating things on the day and to Martin who despite a whole host of SI gremlins still managed to get the results out.

Regards

Alistair