ELO Festive Frolic 2011Yellowcraig, 27 December
There was a big turnout from ESOC for the East Lothian Orienteers’ Christmas event in East Lothian, which was an entertaining mental and physical challenge.
Yellowcraig is a small area on the coast near Dirleton, and it includes sand-dunes, sea buckthorn thickets, open grassy flats and pine plantation. The event was based on the TV game “Only Connect” (it turned out that very few of the competitors were familiar with this). There were 20 controls, and each had a card with a seasonal word on it. The 20 words were connected in 5 sets of 4, though the connections were not always obvious, and the aim was to work out the connections and punch the sets together as far as possible. Each control was worth 10 points, with bonus points awarded for 2, 3 or 4 controls from a set punched consecutively.
Various strategies were adopted - some people ran around checking all the controls, then unscrambled the sets and went round again punching the controls set by set; others punched all the controls as they went, then revisited as many as possible to gather bonus points; others punched only some controls as they went, replanning their route as they discovered more words.
The complexities of the scoring meant that it wasn’t possible to award the prizes at the event, but the results are available on the ELO website.
ESOC members in the top half of the results were as follows (there were 71 competitors):
Andrew Dalgleish 2nd, Mark McLeod 3rd, Craig Nolan 6th, Andrew Lindsay 8th, Chris McLeod 10th, Rona Lindsay 12th, Crawford Lindsay 13th, Margaret Dalgleish 15th, Janice Nisbet 16th, Helena Nolan 21st, Jeni Rowe 23rd, Jonathan Ellis 24th, Robert Findlay 25th, Les Dalgleish 27th, Anne Stevenson 28th, Sally Lindsay 30th, Bill Stevenson 33rd.
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