All the courses for this event were originally planned based on parking at
Ford's just to the west of the mapped area. However it became obvious that several manned road crossing would be needed which would not have been feasible with the small membership of the club. So all the courses were hastily re-planned based on the car park that you used.No matter what plans are put in place there is always that "spanner" lurking not far away. It hit with a bang when just as the last control was about to be placed we found that a barbed wire fence had been erected across the main crossing point in the southern part of the area. Also there was a fair bit of damage recently caused to the other crossing point and I had to do some hasty repairs.
One other problem was that the control descriptions for Green and Blue showed the start as Steep Slope Foot instead of Path Junction - my apologies for this.
Many thanks to the controller - Paul Lowe - who coped extremely well with all the changes and had to pick up on the errors which crept in on my planning - mainly due to my rushing too much and too carelessly to get the re-planned courses completed. Also I would like to thank Brian for printing the master maps and to all the control collectors.
Despite the minor problems everyone I spoke to seemed to have enjoyed their courses - thank you for your favourable comments.
Tony Biggs
Whilst looking at Tony's initial draft courses, it became obvious that we were going to need at least 3 manned road
crossings. This would prove difficult for a small club with limited manpower to achieve. So Tony
opted to go back to the drawing board and came up with the courses, albeit with a bit of tweaking here and there, that you all ran. 2 weeks
earlier and those on the longer courses venturing into Harts would have had a much harder slog as the bracken was still almost impenetrable in
places.
The only major problem was when we found that a barbed wire fence had appeared across one of the crossing points in the SE of the map. This meant that, after a quick re-draw on the master maps, everyone was pointed to use the less inviting southern bridge which was a bit rickety but safe enough after Tony's repair job. Luckily only the brown course was affected by this.
On the organisational front, Colin and his team made it look like a walk in the park, which some of you probably did! And he even managed to get the weather sorted.
Paul Lowe
Suffoc