ORGANISER'S COMMENTS

DFOK has a good reputation for members of the club willing to help at events and Joydens Wood was no exception. There were always enough helpers during the day to carry out all the tasks, although with electronic punching, the start can be run by one person and the finish can be unmanned.

My two teenage sons, with a mixture of threats and bribery, had agreed to do the car parking, and they ably took your £1 and directed you to a space along the forest roads. We nearly ran out of car parking space due to the high attendance , but luckily some early runners started to leave at the critical time and created some room.

My thanks to the DFOK helpers, especially Andrew Evans for dealing with the computer input and print out of results, and to the Woodland Trust for allowing Joydens Wood to be used for the event.

Jack Richmond (DFOK)

PLANNER'S COMMENTS

When planning a score event you know that a wide range of people are likely to be doing the same course and so judgements have to be made about how difficult to make it. Hopefully most of you didn't find the course you did either much too hard or much too easy.

I tried to plan the A course so that the quickest people would get all the controls in about 50-55 minutes in the hope that this would lead to a reasonable spread of scores across all people taking part. This seems to be broadly what happened, although congratulations go to the two orienteers who were so quick that they managed to find them all in less than 45 minutes!

From the feedback we received it seems that most of you enjoyed your runs which was pleasing to hear. The feedback we got from those of you who did the A course suggests that perhaps controls 114 and 119 were generally the ones you found the trickiest. The results of those of you who got the most points suggest that perhaps the optimum route was to go round the controls in a clockwise direction.

I hope the change to control 109 (control 9 on the A course and control 3 on the B course) didn't cause anyone too many problems. As recently as a couple of weeks ago when we finished planning the courses and got the maps printed it was a large depression roughly 15 feet wide and 10 feet deep. However very recent work done in the woods in the last couple of weeks meant that it had become a large depression full of bush cuttings. As we could no longer put the control in the depression itself we decided to put it on the northern edge right by a path in the hope that people would spot its new location quite easily.

Dylan Underhill (DFOK)