It was a shame about the weather, which was in total
contrast to the lovely winter sunshine which we had on the Saturday afternoon
while putting the controls out.
Unfortunately the weather forecast was unusually spot on and it rained
the entire day. The surprise is
over 50 of you braved the conditions which is not far off what we usually get
for a west wight event, anyway thanks for making the effort in such atrocious
conditions.
We had problems deciphering names & times on control cards so apologies for any mistakes, its no fun standing in the wet at the start & finish for 3 hours, getting wet & cold, I wish I had planned the courses so we could have done this in our cars. Other than that the recent forestry work has ruined what was once the best area on the island & makes it hard going especially on Orange & Yellow where many paths have been obliterated.
With the Green course it was my intention to make it
challenging & also give as much route choice as possible, did anyone
contour from 4 to 5? Light Green I
wanted to make as technically challenging as Green, but without the
distance. I feel many of you would
like tougher orienteering but are put off by the distance. Unfortunately this was the one course
which was affected by depleted numbers.
With Orange, I put all the controls within 20m of paths/line features
but attempted to give opportunities to more experienced runners to save time by
going direct & taking risks while newcomers could take the path option,
though whether this was the case given the forest conditions is debatable.
Thanks for my wife Sharon & dad Brian for getting cold
& wet with me & planning the string which not 1 person went on, maybe
we can save this for another day.
Further thanks to Iris Fay for assistance in the car park &
collecting the string and to Jim & Eileen Hollinshed for Registration.
Trevor
Ould - Planner
Microsoft
Challenge - Vestas Style
training day !
Having
made our team cycle at speed along the Tennyson Trail, they arrived
wet and steaming to do the green course.
Having already bought the maps and sorted out their control cards, we sent them off to copy their maps from the masters. Those of us in the support team then got out the coffee we had brought in the minibus. Settling in the warm for an hour of so, we were surprised that 4 of the 6 came back to the bus with a 'stolen' master map after a few minutes. Don't blame them though, as it was so wet they were having difficulty with both the pens writing on the maps and the green cards beginning to disintegrate on them, and this was before they had been into the forest !
Having dried
their maps off for them, we had taken a supply of towels with us, we sent them
off with their marked up maps and after about 50 mins we wandered up to the
finish line to wait for them. We had enough fun trying to walk to the start
boxes, as we kept slipping and sliding and catching our feet on the brambles.
We then
stood, brollies in the open position, at the finish and waited for them to come
back.
- And we
waited.
- And we
waited.
Then we
waited some more. They had been gone over an hour.
I was
getting a little worried by then, and did begin to think that perhaps we had
been a bit too hard on the guys and perhaps we should have sent them off on the
orange, especially as 3 of them were novices !!
Eventually,
our first guy arrived back. Richard is super fit and he had managed to do the
course in a good time, with Ian coming in only 1 minute behind him. We sent
them off back to the minibus to keep warm, have a drink and get dry before they
cycled back to work down the Tennyson Trail.
So we were
left waiting for the other 4 competitors, and it was a while before we saw
Drake, looking very bedraggled, emerging from the forest. He had not found all
the controls, but that was OK.
A competitor
then came in who was not one of ours, who said that he had found a control card
in the forest. Looking at it in horror, we saw that it belonged to one of our
team, Noel, and we then spent some time calling each other on the mobiles to
check if he had returned to the van, or was lost in the forest.
We were now
becoming a little nervous, as we had 1 competitor with no control card and 2
complete novices out in the forest.
A short
while later though, they all emerged from the forest together ( bit of a relief
on my part, having thought we may have had to send searchers out ! ). They had
met up, and both Alan and Paul vouched that Noel had been to the same controls
as them, and Noel had also punched his map to prove he had been there.
We got
everyone back to the van, let them get dry and sent them out to cycle back off
to work.
I had to go
and rescue Drake in the minibus as he had got off the Tennyson Trail in the
wrong place and was heading for Brook rather than work, but other than that,
the guys had a great day, they were all impressed at the severity of the
training day and, hopefully, some of them will be coming orienteering again
over they next few months as they prepare for the Microsoft Challenge. This
year they are going to the Isle of Arran in Scotland and are going to have to
train really hard to be competitive.