February Social 2026Tuesday 25 February 2026
A gusty February evening saw a hardy group of ESOC orienteering regulars huddling outside the Westgate Farm Inn in the Gyle area awaiting instruction from planner Peter. Meanwhile the Turfers spread themselves out far and wide and ran hard once the App had counted down from 10 to 0!
Alison H kindly reports: Peter explained a complicated-sounding orienteering event involving 3 maps,joined but not overlapping in 2 different scales, plus the operation of a temporary railway bridge to complicate things. The main idea was to collect controls either in ascending order or
descending order, so either 1,2,5,7,8,10 etc or 23,22,18, 15, 9 etc. Any collected out of order are
dismissed and penalty of 1 control per minute for a return over the 50 minute limit. Got it??!!
Peter stated that the whole course was about 8.5 km and he did not expect anyone to complete...Now there's a challenge we like in ESOC!
We started on the side of the dual carriageway opposite the pub on the ’South Gyle’ (1:4000)
map which had controls 1,2,23,22 and overlapped the next map at 2 points A&B (B being by the
temporary bridge). I chose to find 23 & 22 then navigate the bridge and railway platform to map
2 (1:4000) which had control 21 and A,B&C for butting up to the next map, unfortunately I didn’t
see ‘C’ which affected my choice of controls on the 3rd map, Gyle Park (1:3000).
Gyle Park is mostly open land surrounding the sports centre so controls were around the edge
and along some of the paths. As I had missed exit C from the previous map I opted a bit too
early to head down the control possibly a little too early so did 17, 16, 15 13, 11, 10, 8, 6, 5 (too
much time left), 4, 3, 2, 1. I managed 6.29km and was back with 4 minutes to spare having
collected 16 controls out of 23.
Thanks to Peter for a great challenge, and yes Tom Dutton did manage to collect all the controls
- well done! Meg Baker was first lady and Sally got the spot prize for being the first competitor back.
The corresponding Turf event was planned by Christmas2 and had 6 competitors trying to outdo each other by accumulating the most points and taking zones from each other. 31 zones were spread across the Gyle housing estate and Gyle Park area. All competitors were on foot - cycling events will become available once we have lighter evenings...patience please cyclists!
For the opening 10 minutes it was very tight across the leaderboard, with JammyDognut, EdMedic23, MarkkuEsoc and sjami44 all vying for the top position. Relative event newcomer Mr_Gixxer chose a less than optimal starting position, but I'm sure he'll be back for more with his enthusiastic nature next time. JammyDognut was hindered by yet another muscle injury during the event - must be trying too hard! sjami44 chose a cunning route and kept a good number of zones which gave him a Points Per Hour (PPH) advantage over all the others and which propelled him to victory. He also took, at some time or another, a total of 25 of the 31 zones - impressive. 2nd place was EdMedic23 and 3rd was MarkkuEsoc. Turf event results can be seen here - FTT #20
Thanks to the Westgate Inn which was very obliging and kept the servery open late for people to get some tasty dinner!
Our next social is on Tuesday 10 March - make a note in your diaries now!