Caddihoe Chase 2010 - Official's Comments

Organiser's Comments

It never ceases to amaze me the number of hours put in voluntarily by willing people to ensure that we all get the chance to take part in our chosen sport. From the early days when we agreed to stage this year's Caddihoe Chase our surveying members and mappers have made countless visits to the forest and spent hour upon hour drawing and redrawing the maps.

Then it is over to the planners to walk the ground and spend further time visiting control sites, compiling courses etc. Only to have some of their work undone by late requests from the Forest Commission to avoid certain areas. Then there is the behind the scenes computer team who configure the systems ready to take the data and produce results at the flick of a switch (or twitch of a mouse). We now all expect results within hours or minutes rather than the two weeks of yesteryear.

And of course overseeing all this is the Controller who needs to be involved in every aspect of the event, from details on the flier to length and technical difficulty of the courses. And the over riding thought in all of this is to give you, the competitors, as enjoyable and challenging event as possible. I hope we succeeded in that so I thank all of these stalwarts on your behalf.

We were very lucky to have Birchwood Tourist Park as an event centre and they made us very welcome. This did necessitate a slightly longer walk to the starts than I would have preferred but luckily the weather stayed fine so the choice of the assembly area proved the right one.
As you know we suffered a stolen control towards the end of the Saturday which necessitated truncating 5 courses and treating the control before the missing one as the Finish. This then resulted in shorter winning times for everyone on the affected courses and, rather than having them turn up late on the Sunday for the Chasing Start, it was decided that we would use a revised base time of 10.15 for these courses. We thought we had managed to tell everyone of this but clearly some slipped through the net but I hope we managed to sort that out at the start.

I must offer my apologies regarding the awarding of the Caddihoe Chase trophies. I made a couple of mistakes when working out who should receive which Trophy and I am contacting those affected to correct my mistake. Human error compounded by the current complexity of calculating classes within colours is my only excuse.

Thanks for coming and I hope you enjoyed the weekend.

Ian Sayer (on behalf of All Wessex Orienteering Club members).

Controller's Comments

A memorable Dorset weekend! Superb weather, a first rate assembly area and a very capable WSX team certainly enhanced the reputation of the Caddihoe Chase as a great way to start the new season.

You all braved the furrows and tussocks of Wareham Forest which tested the planning team to the full, a task not made easier by additional areas being put out of bounds only 3 weeks before the event.

From the point of view of Controller the weekend was memorable for all the wrong reasonswith vandals striking on Day 1! At about 3.30pm on Saturday I was visiting the finish when a competitor ran in saying that control 636,a small depression on top of a hill,was missing. On reaching the site which was less than 200m from the finish it was clear that the whole control unit,Stake,S/I box and flag had been removed as well as the planner's tag. Despite a search of the area no trace can be found. The control site was the penultimate control on 5 courses and close to another penultimate control on other courses so it is difficult to understand how the vandals got away without being seen. I would be very interested to hear from anyone who can throw any further light on this. Another, but possibly unconnected puzzle, was that one of the white/yellow course control units had been moved some 10m during the competition.

Some 30 competitors on 5 courses were affected by the loss of 636 including some of the Interland selection runners and with the urgent need to produce Chasing Start lists for Day 2 it was decided to curtail all 5 courses at the control previous to 636 at which point runners had not been affected by any external factors. This action was subsequently endorsed by British Orienteering.

On your behalf I would like to thank Ian Sayer, Roger Crickmore, Richard Arman and the whole of the WSX team for their sustained hard work before and during the weekend. This year the two days of the Caddihoe Chase were on adjacent but different areas which demanded considerable extra work as Controller and I would like to thank Chris and Lynn Branford, Martin Cross and my wife Barbara, acting as 'Assistant Controllers' for their unstinting help before and during the weekend.

John Warren (WIM)