Controllers’ Comments.
Just after the club was awarded (is that the right term?) the Yvette Baker Trophy YHOA Qualifying round for 2018 we had one of our Wednesday morning walk / runs from Oakwell. Two things became clear, it had potential for a YBT round and the map was way out of date. The base map (from 1998) was great but Kirklees Council and the staff at Oakwell are continually updating and improving so much work was needed.
Oakwell will never be an area suitable for elite orienteering, there are two many paths, too many fences, too many fields and too few features. However Gill did a really good job of providing courses that were possible for the relative newcomers to the sport and gave the experienced runners a chance for a really good blast on runnable terrain.
Winning times (and those of the last finisher) are always a good indication of the quality of the planning and they all seemed spot on.
The area cannot support anything longer than a Green so we decided to put on a Score. Big problem, to visit all the controls was only 2.8km – much less than Green. So we went for 30 controls – Odd numbers first, then switch to evens. At this point Jackie (our tech guru) threw a wobbly. There would need to be a compulsory last Odd before starting the Evens. That is why you all had to visit the monument before changing to even numbers.
On our first visits we ended up with mud up to our knees, today the sun shone, the finish gave panoramic views over much of the park and the car park field was firm and dry.
As club Treasurer, I was concerned about the security of the SI boxes and asked for them all to be grippled. Overkill? Probably. On our walks round during the day we saw no-one who looked likely to walk off with one of the boxes but perhaps we needed to be sure.
David and Juliet Morgan |
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