ELO Festive Frolic 2017John Muir Country Park, 30 December
There were plenty of ESOC members, and several prize-winners, at East Lothian Orienteers' Christmas score event.
The Festive Frolic is a fun event, organised by East Lothian Orienteers just after Christmas every year. It always has an interesting twist - visiting the controls in the most obvious way doesn’t maximise your score.
This year’s event was at John Muir Country Park, near Dunbar, with Registration and Download in the East Links Family Park café. The area includes fairly flat mature pine forest with a good path network, a coastal fringe with dunes covered in marram grass, and slightly hillier terrain and mature deciduous forest in the SW part, near Foxlake. The weather was overcast with a few spots of rain, and it felt quite cold, despite being milder than the preceding week.
The event was a 60-minute score, with a mass start. There were 31 controls, but only 20 were shown on the map: 10 controls worth 10 points each, and 10 worth 20 points. Each of the 20 point controls had a map snippet showing the location of another control, worth 10 points, with a bonus of a further 10 points if you visited it straight after its 20-point “parent”. The other control was on a decorated Christmas tree, with no clues as to its location, worth 20 points if you could find it! As usual there were penalty points for anyone late back.
Many enjoyed the café while discussing route choice and waiting for the results.
Andrew Lindsay was the overall winner, with Martin Quirke in 2nd place. Other ESOC members in the top half of the results were as follows (there were 83 competitors):
Ben Brown 9th, Rona Lindsay 12th, Jo Stevenson 15th, Alison Cunningham 16th, Walter Clark 21st, Rachel Brown 22nd, Crawford Lindsay 23rd, Timothy May 24th, Margaret Dalgleish 26th, Maggie Scrugham 29th, Roger Garnett 30th, Hanne Robertson 32nd, Les Dalgleish 33rd, Colin Tyre 34th, Anne Stevenson 36th, Ewart Scott 37th, Elspeth Bleakley 38th, Sally Lindsay 41st.
Full results, including a list of prize-winners, are available in the Festive Frolic news item on the ELO website.
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