Results and Split Times
Routegadget & Splitsbrowser
WinSplits
BOF Ranking Points
EAUL Standings
Organiser’s Comments
Hopefully everyone enjoyed the event today. I heard lots of positive comments about Roger’s courses, which seemed to provide plenty of variety and a few traps along the way.
Originally we were going to use the sports centre (opposite Morrisons) for the event centre, but after having a wander around it became obvious that this would not work for the junior courses, as we would have to provide innumerable road crossings, which would have stretched our volunteer base to & beyond its limits. However, I found Dereham Meeting Point and realised that it gave access to the water meadows and Scarning to the west, which would be ideal for courses 6 and 7; as a club we always try to make the junior courses a “proper” urban, as opposed to a run round a park.
I thought the atmosphere in and around the event centre was lovely today (if a bit stuffy until we opened the windows). The tea and cake stall seemed to go down very well, and hopefully encouraged people to stick around a bit longer than they normally would and have a chat. There were only 4 slices of chocolate fudge cake left at the end, which pleased my wife, although she was hoping for more ginger cake! We raised over £110 for GOSH.
As with all orienteering events they only work because of the effort put in by volunteers on the day. Thank you all for making it run so smoothly. A particular thank you to Emma & Kate Jarrett (WAOC), who helped on the cake stall and helped tidy up at the end. I am sure many of us would be happy to help out at other club’s events, so maybe this could be the start of a new trend. It would also help build links between the clubs, and foster the East Anglian Orienteering community, a bit like at The JK, where SUFFOC, WAOC and NOR put up their club tents next to each other each day.
See you all at Sudbury in a few weeks.
Jonathan.
Planner’s Comments
Dereham and New Scarning has several areas with interesting networks of roads and alleyways which presented navigational challenges, though in the courses these had to be linked with less interesting connecting legs. The green spaces broke up the road and path sections and offered some variety.
On the longer courses I varied the early controls in New Scarning which meant courses 3 and 4 did not include control 211 which proved challenging in courses 1 and 2. Also later, on course 3, control 218 was approached from the north which meant it was less difficult than when approached from the east on courses 1 and 2. Overall the competitors made light work of the technical problems on courses 3 and 4 and it appears these courses ended up less challenging.
As I started putting out the controls I was surprised to find densely parked cars, a van and a lorry parked close to some of the control sites in areas which I had previously found uncluttered on a Sunday. This affected the visibility of controls 207 (courses 3 and 5) and 234 (courses 6 and 7) and WinSplits shows this led to time loss.
I would like to thank Jonathan (mapper/planner) for his comments on the early drafts of the courses and the production of the maps, Mike (controller) for feedback on the later drafts, Daniel for sorting the files for SI and Routegadget and the control collectors for finishing things off by mid afternoon.
Roger.
View all the courses and the controls Roger mentions on Routegadget, add your route if you haven’t, and see which route(s) others took.
Controller’s Comments
Dereham has some interesting areas for urban orienteering and Roger made good use of these even though it meant some longer connecting legs. The area has a nice variety of streets connected by alleyways, an area of houses with only pedestrian access ideal for juniors, as well some green open areas and the complex shopping and car park centre of town. The people I talked to enjoyed their courses. The map suffers from the limitation of a lot of urban maps that the specified minimum gap between lines on the map of 0.15 mm is too small for most of us to resolve. This makes route choice a bit of a lottery and that was true today. Also people didn’t spot the ‘ruined’ part of the control description for control 204, the linear thicket, which according to IOF specifications, means parts of it have fallen to ground level and therefore are presumably crossable. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done if I was running.
Mike Bickle.