Planner's Comments
I hope everyone enjoyed their runs in Troston Forest and, in the case of the longer courses, Shambellie Wood and Troston Hill too despite the amount of physical effort required to move quickly - or even slowly - through the terrain.  Courses lengths were based on the results of the C4 event we held in May 2003 and the leading times on most courses were close to the SOL
guidelines.  The exceptions were courses 6, 7and 9, which proved to be too short, even though they met the SOL ratios to course 11, where the winner was within a minute of the guideline time.  However, when the times on these courses are viewed by class I suspect that most competitors were glad that they were no longer than they were.  I was cheered by the fact that there were very few retirements. 

A few people commented on the map, mostly in respect of unmapped boulders. The general rule is that only significant boulders in an area are mapped. In a boulder-rich area like this that means anything above 1m, but what do you do about boulders that are 0.8m high but 3m long?  Those of you who had 118 will have seen that it was less than 1m high, but it was the only boulder in that section of wood, and therefore 'significant'.   What you cannot do is to try to map every boulder, or the map would be quite unusable.  Our problem is that not all the significant 1m+ boulders are on
this map yet.  Sorry if you were one of the people who were perplexed by this.

I am grateful to Pat for his calm and careful controlling and his gentle advice and suggestions.  I would like to thank all those competitors who kindly expressed their appreciation of their courses and the area.  Last and by no means least I wish to thank Ian Turner and Doug Kilpatrick for helping to put out SI units on Sunday morning and these two plus Robert Kerr and Tim for helping to collect controls - a tough job at the end of a long day.

Dave McQuillen     

 

Controller’s Comments

 

I think Dave made the best possible use of Troston/Shambellie. His courses demanded that competitors stayed in close contact with the map, yet he avoided for the most part the greener bits of the map. The times were spot on for all the courses with the exception of 7 and 9 where Pauline McAdam and John Tullie respectively made it look too easy. The good weather helped: it would have been a different story if the previous week had been wet.

 

Some competitors made suggestions for including more boulders on the map. These will be passed on.

 

Thanks to all the Solway organising team for their efforts.

 

Pat Flanagan CUNOC  Controller

 

 

 

Organiser’s comments

 

Extensive use was made of the club website in the weeks leading up to this event, as a simple route to providing the required information.  Looking at the number of ‘hits’ on the web site over this period, this source of information was well used.   My only concern is that this may be encouraging people not to bother with pre-entering and to rely instead on entry on the day.

 

Following the initial hiatus with lots of people wishing to enter on the day and a pile of novices in relation to the computers and the software staffing the enquiries tent, the various arrangements seemed to run very smoothly.  The credit for this goes to the Solway band of helpers who demonstrated their usual low key delivery of an efficient event – my thanks go to them.

 

After being associated with a number of rather wet events in recent years it was lovely to have such a fine day for this event – perhaps we had the correct number of righteous people in the event team?

 

Tim O’Donoghue

 

 

Acknowledgements

Solway Orienteering Club wish to thank the following people without whose willing help and co-operation the event could not have taken place.
Messrs David Goss and Sandy Anderson of David Goss & Associates acting on behalf of  the owners of Troston Forest and Troston Hill.
Mr L H Wilson of G M Thomson & Co for Shambellie Estate
Mr Graeme Hodgeson, Universal Training & Development Ltd
Mr Shennan, Craigbill
Mr W Graham, Auchengray