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NOR’s next event is the County & City Double Dumpling – details are here – get your entries in now!
November is a bumper month for events in our region with many not too far away. See a full listing here.

Planner’s Comments

The weather for the last two events we have held at Shouldham has been horrendous. When putting the controls out at first light this morning there were spots of rain and I was not sure how the day would turn out. As it happened, the weather was glorious, which certainly added to my enjoyment of the day and hopefully yours.

Our original plan was to base the event at The Sincks – partly because it is an area that the shorter courses rarely visit and partly because the Forestry Commission has been carrying out major work in Shouldham Warren, which only ended at the end of September. With about 3 weeks to go, we found out that we would not be able to use our designated parking area and our backup was vetoed by a local resident. We had no option, but to revert to basing the event at Shouldham Warren. This required a total re-plan and quite a bit of work compressed into a short time frame. To be honest, I think the shorter courses benefited from this change, as the bracken and undergrowth at The Sincks is still very dense, making it a very physical challenge. Shouldham Warren is also a much more varied area and in my opinion one of the nicest East Anglian Forestry Commission forests.

I decided that we should still use The Sincks for the longer courses, but then you have to work out how to get the courses out there and back again. In the end we decided on two long legs for various reasons – Mow Fen, which is the forest to the north of the open area, has very dense undergrowth with very few suitable control sites, the open area between Mow Fen and The Sincks is really heavy going (so best avoided) and any control sites to the south of the open area don’t really add anything. This does lead to some dead running, but hopefully you did have to make some decisions about route choice. I look forward to seeing peoples routes on routegadget.

Thanks to Michael Chopping for controlling, who gently guided me to making many improvements to the courses. And, thanks to all those who helped collect controls (Steve, Peter, Alan, Peter, Rodney, Ella and Tim). Particularly to Tim, to whom I gave a particularly dodgy map (lets just say that my printer made some bits of dark green look yellow), and who had a bit of a nightmare in the The Sincks. Anyone who took the straight route between 211 and 240 will know what he went through. By the way, the quickest route was to exit the forest to the south, and then run round the paths to start of the earthbank and along to the control.

I hope you all enjoyed it.

Jonathan

Note: On looking at the OS map of the area today, I have realised that the open area, which I thought was Mow Fen, is in fact un-named and Mow Fen is the grotty bit of forest to the north of this. I have updated my comments above to reflect this.

Controller’s Comments

For the first time in a very long time we had planned the majority of the courses in The Sincks, but some 3 weeks ago we were informed we could no longer use the parking area there. So Jonathan had to completely re-plan the event. With only 3 weeks, Jonathan planned some good courses using the whole of the warren very well. This had issues, as you may have observed there has been some thinning throughout the warren, which has opened up the visibility but not the runability due to the brashings. Although the courses were in the majority on the long side, this gave most of you the chance to enjoy more of the warren and the weather made it a lovely day to be orienteering. I volunteered to control this event after I had offered my services to SUFFOC for King’s. As I only live a mile or so from the Warren I was convinced by Alan B to say yes. With the need to re-plan I have been able to get around all the new control sites in time to allow for all those last minute changes that are needed with a re-plan. In hindsight it is maybe too much to control 2 events 3 weeks apart but at the moment 1 down and 1 to do. Thanks to a good and organised planner (and his assistant, Ella) and the organiser who was so well organised he even got a quick green course in as well.