Planner's Comments - Julian LyneQE Country Park is always likely to produce physical courses, especially the longer and more technical ones. With extensive felling earlier in the summer leaving large areas of brashings, and undergrowth at its most luxuriant at this time of the year, I felt it appropriate to keep the lengths of the technical courses well towards the lower end of the range, with the majority of controls in the more attractive parts of the forest – if you spent a lot of time in the “thick and nasty”, then I can assure you that there was a better way. The approach appears to have been justified, with most competitors returning times appropriate to the course. Light Green looks to be 5-10 minutes on the plus side, but the best splits for the course would have produced a time of around 34 minutes, and time losses by competitors occurred at various points on the course. Co-incidentally, the BOF Focus magazine arrived this morning, and an article there reminds planners that Light Green should be TD4, and in QECP that’s as hard as it gets.The overnight loss of 233 (stake, kite, punch, and tape!) was a nuisance. Replacement with another punch was not possible, as I had used the complete SOC stock for the event, (keeping a punch or two in reserve now seems an obvious precaution), so “find the control without a punch” became the novelty addition to Green, Blue, and Brown. Thank you all for taking that in good part, and for keeping the secret up to the end. A few people came by afterwards with kind comments, thank you for that. Nobody came by with an unkind comment, thank you for that also. I did hear that someone had mentioned nettles around one of the Yellow controls; that could have been one of three. The areas round those controls, and indeed a couple of the adjacent paths, have all received several “damn good thrashings” over the last few weeks, and it should have been possible to punch without coming into contact with anything nasty. Your thanks should go to SOC members Simon Waller and Mike Maliphant, control hangers and collectors. Without them a lot more than 233 would have been missing! I hope you all enjoyed yourselves, thank you for coming.
Controller's Comments - Robin SmithI made no changes to Julian's courses which were well received, and SOC's efficient manpower ensured the event ran smoothly. The missing punch was stolen together with the flag and surprisingly the planners tape sometime on Saturday evening. I first ran in QECP in 1970 and have been competing or training there virtually every year since. The coniferous area where most of the controls were concentrated is now at its best, though I fear the FC's policy of removing non-native species will soon see its demise. |
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