Castlelaw CATI
Results now available. Score course should now be correct, though if you spot any mistakes please let me know!
Castlelaw Planners Report
Thank you to everybody who came along to the event. We hope that you enjoyed the courses on what is a challenging and exposed area with lots of height climb. With this in mind, we tried to minimise the climb out on the courses by having the start higher than the finish, but still close to parking and registration, however this was always going to entail a very exposed start area so a big thank you to the helpers who braved it out.
On the day the weather treated us fairly kindly in comparison with what we have experienced whilst planning, the amount of lingering snow delaying the start of the process until late February, and even then we were almost up to our knees in it in places! Just 3 weeks prior to the event the blast of wintry weather left another blanket over the area, and left us thinking that marking the control sites with white tape wasn’t the best of decisions! Also a big thank you to Margaret (and Les) Dalgleish for acting as controller to us, who provided constructive criticism and encouragement in a very efficient manner for which we were very grateful. What we did feel worked very well was walking the area together, once the initial planning was complete so that we could talk through different control sites, the terrain and routes on the area, rather than by phone/email which is far more difficult! Once again Janet provided her usual efficient organisational skills, ESOC should be grateful for all the time that she provides, and her recent ‘British Orienteering Services to Orienteering Award’ is rightful recognition of this. Also thanks to the control collectors, Martin, Margaret, Les, Bill & Janet, it’s a great relief for the planner to have help at the end of the day, don’t forget to volunteer yourselves when you can!
It was pleasing to have such a large number of competitors at the event, this caught us a little short of maps on some courses, so apologies to those who had to copy down their course from a master map. On the score event it was good to see that over two thirds of competitors punched at least 1 of the 3 bonus controls. One issue raised was the fairness of the extra controls and their locations dependent on the route you chose. Of course in a score format event of this type it cannot be totally fair; however we tried to position these controls so that if your overall course shape was either clockwise or anti-clockwise there would be an almost equal amount of distance and climb to cover. So we had one control with map attached on the East of the area giving the location of a control to the West, and vice versa, with the 3rd control with map attached found in the centre of the area directing you to the bonus control fairly close to the finish. Finally, we gave away the additional locations at controls which we felt the vast majority of competitors would visit. It is noticeable that the majority of score finishers were well inside the time limit of 60 minutes, was this a function of the finish being downhill from all the controls I wonder, and a mis-judgment being made in time to return home? We’d welcome any feedback that you have.
The three bonus controls were : Map at 202 gave location of control 207, at 220 it gave away 203, and finally at 188 the location of 186 was discovered.
We look forward to seeing you at future events.
Mark & Jeni Rowe
Posted on 17th Apr 10
by Andrew Dalgleish - Webmaster
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