PAR TIMES
Brown     76:59
Blue        86:05
Green     84:24
Lt Green 91:14
Orange   76:24
Yellow     31:08
White      32:38

In arriving at the Green par time, the ten fastest times, all CROC members participating  in their club championships, have been ignored.

PLANNER'S COMMENT'S

When I first volunteered to plan and found out the area would be Westerham I was pleased.  I thought, "nice big area so choice of possible courses should be quite large".  However when I came to sit down and look at the map I realised that it wasn't going to be as easy as I first thought.  Westerham may cover a large area but it is divided into distinct sections of useable terrain by public roads and fields.  This limited the routes that the orange - brown courses took, as specific crossings were needed.

The two shorter courses, white and yellow, were planned to avoid crossing any roads.  This restricted them to Hosey Common and although it has an extensive path network there are a bit too many decision points.  I also found that the bracken covered a larger area than mapped and obscured the northern paths.  This meant that the paths visible in November dictated the courses.

It was decided that the longer courses flow should run clockwise as recent events at Westerham had an anti-clockwise direction.  I tried to find control sites and legs that would give the correct technical challenge for the course.  I do recognise from looking at the results that green, light green and orange may have been on the long side.  As the length of these courses was dictated mainly by the roads crossing it is difficult to see where substantial length could have been lost whilst retaining justifiable controls and legs.

Unfortunately I didn't hear many comments on the courses on the day, but I hope there were a few people who enjoyed themselves and will return to Westerham in the future.

Lorna Philp (DFOK)

CONTROLLER'S COMMENT'S

Competitor-friendly events are a great objective to aim for. Using the Chartwell National Trust location offers great facilities - a good car park that is mostly hard standing, space and power for registration/download, toilets and the added luxury of a café. The downside for the competitor is that the land layout, particularly in relation to White & Yellow courses, makes it hard to provide much difference from one event to another. DFOK are not a large club and manpower will prevent having 2 starts or finishes for a district event. Whilst this does not seem to detract too much from people's enjoyment I have come to believe that Hosey Common is not the best of areas to provide good short courses and I know that Lorna struggled to offer anything that was different from last time but still broadly met the White & Yellow guidelines. In the end we played around with the start, stuck with a certain flow for the courses, swept the paths on the White course the afternoon before the event and kept our fingers crossed. I think we got away with it but appreciate that was more down to the good judgement of parents who shadowed their youngsters on the White course. In my opinion Hosey Common is unlikely to be a good introductory area for orienteering as it is far too "busy" with detail.

As the start & finish were remote from the car park DFOK decided to experiment with a "turn up and go" start system. In theory this is a competitor-friendly initiative. It certainly works for fairly small events I have been to. With a 2 hour start time slot and an expectation of around 75 competitors on the most popular course I felt this to be a reasonable objective. However, what happened throws into doubt in my mind that this system will work well for events where the start is not within close proximity to the car park. My belief remains that there should be on average only one competitor starting on each course each minute. Having two master maps and assuming on average that competitors will take between 1 and 2 minutes to copy down the map seems to indicate that the process should work. So that is what Lorna and I went with. However, what I failed to appreciate and which may be obvious to others, is that the majority of people seemed to turn up to the start area within about the same 1 hour slot, around 10.30 to 11.30 am. The second little complication was that until about the Monday or so before the event I was under the assumption that CROC were running the light green course, as they had done the year before. But no, they apparently had arranged to run Green. In the end Green had 87 competitors, 27 of whom were from CROC, a significant number of whom would normally have run other courses. Lastly, from my observations at the start and looking at the majority of splits to number 1, ignoring the fastest who perhaps has a photographic memory and doesn't need to copy the course down, it is possible that the Green course has more competitors who do take more than 2 minutes to copy their course. This is something I had not appreciated before and, as a controller, do need to learn from.

The outcome was that there were some competitors waiting some considerable time to start. Whilst I can only apologise for the inconvenience, I would also point out that there is every probability at any event offering this flexibility that you will not be able to start straight away. As it was cold, to try to alleviate some of the problem Lorna made up an additional Green master map. This may have only been partially successful as by then the queue had probably started to work its way through. Most competitors I believe took the delays good naturedly. As there was probably more than 1 competitor per minute on the Green course at the peak point I feel that it was not satisfactory as I personally don't think that fair. I will be happy to hear from competitors who felt that the arrangements were unacceptable and that a better alternative exists. For my own position I will learn from this and certainly not organise any event offering "turn up and go" with an expectation of more than 150 competitors unless the start is within sight of the car park - so competitors can assess the queue and decide whether to wait in the warm/dry. I may also reconsider whether I wish to control an event operating this way as I believe strongly in the one minute gap - ideally I would always prefer more.

The lie of the land to a large extent dictated the approximate course lengths, with it being fairly difficult to get much between about 3km and 5km, right in the bracket where Orange, Light Green and Green need to fit. I can see from the times that Orange was on the long side, as was Light Green, influenced in part by the fact that CROC was expected to run the course. I can also see from the Green times that whilst it is within the BOF length guidelines it was probably marginally too long for this event. Nevertheless I hope you enjoyed the courses on offer and the more pleasant parts of Westerham Chart.

Onto some of the many positive sides of the event. DFOK had a good turnout on the day at 272 starters (compared to 202 the year before) so it does make their efforts worthwhile. The facilities are undoubtedly good, and the National Trust was very helpful. Most important of all, despite limited resource, the DFOK members who helped put on this event were enthusiastic and committed. A number were there at 7.30am to start putting controls out (many could not be placed the day before) and were still there until the NT were almost locking the car park at 5pm as the last controls were collected and accounted for.

I believe CROC had a good competition. I don't know the handicaps they were using but on straight finish times it could hardly be said to have been close. The par time on the Green course has been, or will be, amended to exclude the CROC runners down to around 10^th place.

Keith Tonkin (GO)
keith@aesica.com