Newcastle and Tyneside Orienteers Results Service

Sunday 7th April 2013 at Morpeth (Northumbrian Gathering)

Officials:

Organiser: John Crosby

Planner: Adrian Barnes

Congratulations to the trophy winnners:

• Open Men - Chris Lakey
• Veteran Men - John Phizacklea
• Junior Men- Oliver Wright,
• Open Women - Nicola Crosby
• Veteran Women- Tricia Davies,
• Junior Women- Jenny Lamb
• Family (course 1) - Cudahy Family
• Family (course 2 ) - Green Family

Comments

Judging by all the discussions I heard I seemed to have succeeded in setting you some interesting puzzles to solve in the Trophy course. My objective was to keep you thinking and checking the whole time with some tricky navigation and a lot of route choices. Also, I tried to force you to look a long way off the red line for the best route.

I took time to measure the various choices and changed some control locations to make them more even. It was good to see and hear that you used most of the routes available. Despite the people on the main street of Morpeth I believe that the quicker routes for the two long(ish) legs were to come north out of the pedestrianized maze on the north west corner and then run along the north of the map before turning south to the respective controls. Generally in this type of event where seconds can make all the difference it is quicker to take a route which involves fewer sharp turns which, inevitably, cause you to slow down and lose time.

I heard some of you talking about losing time inside the control circle from not seeing the marker. Again just a few seconds but it can make all the difference. I’ve found that it is vitally important to read the full control description before getting to the control so that you can run to the precise part of the feature where you will then see the flag. Due to the nature of Urban orienteering flags are generally not visible unless you are actually standing at the precisely described location – you cant see through or round walls and buildings as easily as you can see between trees!

Patrick noticed the problem I had in translating the symbol control descriptions in a couple of instances. When a control is on a bend or corner of a wall or building, the symbols show very clearly where the flag is but some of them are quite tricky to translate into words. Bends and corners can be inward or outward so that has to be specified. But when you do that, the direction sometimes looks different from what the symbol would show, especially where there is more than one in the circle. Have a look at control 119 ( 4 on course 1) and 127 (13 on course 1).

Oh, sorry about the missing bit of fence beside control 13. I mapped those fences there about 4 times and managed to lose that bit in the final draft. Thankfully it was right beside the control and you couldn’t go any other way than back out the way you’d come in, so there was no unnecessary backtracking, but I can see how it could have thrown you for a few seconds. At least I put on the new fence around Ha Hill (the hill between 12 and 13 on course 1. They only started construction on Wednesday and I mapped it yesterday lunchtime just before printing the maps !!

I hope you enjoyed the challenges I set. I’ve had an idea to put on a night event on this map as part of the Night Owl series over next winter. Now that should add another challenging dimension !! Look out for it and come along and really give your navigation a workout. After that, the navigation of a normal forest event will be a piece of cake.

Adrian Barnes.

Split Times (pdf. file)

Course One (2.1 km. )

Course Two (1.7 km. )