In between some very damp and murky days,
it turned out to be a bright and relatively warm autumn day for this Level B event.
Fineshade is a thriving place these days, with walkers and mountain bikers as well
as around 130 orienteers enjoying this woodland. The Forestry Commission were very
helpful and we were able to get power for the download tent, though registration for
Entry on the Day was a bit crowded due to a Craft Fair. The Fineshade Warden was very
busy organising car parking, and the overflow car park was in use as well as roadside parking.
A Level B event has age class groupings overlaid onto colour
coded courses, and there were 9 excellent courses planned by Chris Phillips and controlled by
Peter Leverington, which used a section of land that is seldom used, so a bit of novelty was possible.
Two starts makes life a little bit more difficult for an organiser, but hopefully they were reasonably
well signed and easy to find. A number of you felt that parking was expensive, but we had to pay the
standard charge, and this was listed in the published final details.
I used a good quantity of helpers on the day, and I’d like to thank
them all for their assistance, events cannot go ahead without such volunteer support.
I hope that you all enjoyed running in Fineshade.
Bob Haskins.
For the first time in many years we
had the opportunity to use the area south of the old railway cutting
and I had hoped to be able to take all the “technical” courses down there.
However the distances proved too great for some of the shorter courses.
The effects of the dry summer and the warm autumn
gave both myself and the mapper a number of problems. A number of the water features
had all but disappeared and several streams became dry gullies. Visiting control sites
in mid October, it was clear that the grass in some of the open areas was still growing
very strongly and the vegetation was not going to die back as we had hoped, leading to
one or two tweaks on the green and short blue courses in order to avoid one of the worst areas.
Many thanks to Ernie, Roy and Bob for the kite hanging efforts on
Saturday and to Roger, Glyn, Molly, Steve, Ernie and Alastair for their help on Sunday afternoon.
Without your help these old legs would not have coped! Finally a very big thank you to Peter
for his “light touch” controlling.
Chris Phillips.
As one would expect working with the BOF 2011 Club of the Year,
everything soon started to move smoothly along. Chris’s courses began to emerge four months before
the event, the map was updated, controls tagged and checked so that all was ready to go a month before
the event date. Bob’s organization team soon became involved so that by the event Sunday all was in
place in the forest and running smoothly at the event centre.
Chris’s courses made good use of the area and using the west side of
the old railway track opened up new areas for the longer courses. Unfortunately the railway embankments
along the central part are exceedingly steep and at this time of the year dangerous to cross so the only
safe cross over at the south end was close to a large area now OOB. The steep slopes also prevented shorter
courses using the central bit as an ‘in out’ crossover.
The less smooth bits are the forest floor, where recent forestry workings
have left areas of ground strewn brashings. Most of the scattered tree areas are almost fully covered with
branches making movement difficult and the undergrowth symbol indicated that for route choice. Unfortunately
some of the white areas, which under ISOM are defined as 100-80% run, do have small areas of brashings where
individual trees have been felled and the side branches stripped and dumped on the spot. Random, small scattered
areas of brashings are not easy to map or show when you realize 1mm at 1:10000 scale represents 10 metres on the ground.
Warm dry summers also meant the grass was high in the white areas which increased the difficulty of deciding where
the brashings actually are to map or run across.
I am sure everyone will want me to thank LEI OC for putting on yet another good event.
Peter Leverington - NOR.