Delamere Badge Event (including Delamere Trophy) Sunday 30 January 2005

Organiser's Comments (Mike Smithard)

Thank you all for turning up in great numbers once again. We had well over 200 EODs (with many newcomers, I believe) adding to the 520 pre-entries. This strained one or two supplies of paperwork but the queue at registration never seemed to be significant whenever I passed by. The number of over-printed maps were sufficient on all courses but my technical knowledge of generators and/or of surge control devices needs to be improved as our hired generator not only blew the control device but also 2 of our 4 computers. The low powered but computer compatible MDOC generator saw us through but was not capable of printing and downloading simultaneously without risk, so results on the day could not be displayed. We are sorry for that.

My thanks to the team leaders who seemed to cope admirably without interference from me and especially to Jenny Beasant and Tim Palmer for the time consuming and stressful jobs of entries and computer management.

This forest continually evolves, each edition of the map shows in the green and yellow screens how it is thinned, cleared and re-establishes itself. In 25 years, I have seen areas runnable, felled, impenetrable and now runnable again. My course certainly went into areas not visited before and, whilst the last few controls seemed to go through continuous green, it was never desperate and probably better than shown. Is an organiser who also competes totally confident in the abilities of his teams or abrogating his responsibilities? See you here again in 3(?) years time.

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Planner's Comments (Bob Verity)

When I decided to take on the planning role I wondered whether, after 35 years, anything new could be brought to bear on orienteering in Delamere. To put it bluntly, the forest has been used so often that the old hands knew all the control sites and could find them without using the map.

Fortunately Malcolm McIvor had the idea of combining Delamere with his recent map of Old Pale & Nettleford Wood, but the geography of the event meant that only the longer courses could use the new 1:15000 version. The marrying of the 2 maps was not entirely straightforward, since Delamere had a 2.5m contour interval whilst Old Pale and Nettleford had been surveyed at 5m. The rest of the courses were restricted to the more familiar central and eastern areas.

The planner's task wasn't helped when, by some quirk of fate, Forest Enterprise started to "thin out" some prime stretches of light green forest, and by the inevitable discovery that certain sites selected during an armchair planning exercise were not valid owing to inaccuracies of the existing map. In the time available only a partial resurvey was possible, but it did ensure that the terrain in the vicinity of the chosen sites was mapped correctly as well as revealing some "new" control sites and uprating the runnability of some parts of the forest. The validity of these "new" sites might be questioned, but they were all in the right place and did provide something of a challenge to the old hands

But the main approach of the planner was to construct legs which offered realistic route choice options so that even the most seasoned campaigner had to read the map detail to select the optimum route. The M21L winning time was bang on target. The other course lengths complied with the BOF ratios, so I presume everyone was happy. Judging by the comments they seemed to be.

The Club is indebted to Robin Tilston and Malcolm McIvor, who between them, produced 3 new versions of the map in a short space of time, and to Graham Nilsen, as Controller, for his valued suggestions and refinements. My personal thanks go to Andrew Tarr & my wife Barbara, for all their help in putting out the controls, and to Barry & Jill Barnes for their hospitality over the weekend of the event.

I have to apologise for the failure of the E-boxes. To guard against possible vandalism, some 20 stakes and 40 boxes were put out and checked on the morning of the event, and there was simply not the effort available to check the rest.

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Lost property

Please contact Barbara Jones (01928-788916) to retrieve the following items of lost property:.

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Trophy winners

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Badge Times (JM1, JW2 and JW4 times updated on 11/3/05)

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