Organiser’s comments (Phil Warry)
I was just staring to think about planning the courses for this event, when it was suggested that I could use the maps that were used for the JK Training day at Purdown on Good Friday. I discovered that Dudley Budden had a lot of maps left over, so it seemed a good idea not to have to reinvent the wheel. The maps had 20 controls on them, so I did wonder whether that would be sufficient. However, there were 3 suggested courses which were roughly equivalent to a Yellow, Light Green and Blue so I thought why not. This did mean that there were quite a lot of controls which were common to all courses but as this was an informal event it didn’t matter particularly. Having planned a couple of previous events at Purdown before it was interesting to see that there were quite a few new control sites.
It became apparent when doing the recce the previous Saturday just how much undergrowth and brambles there is on Purdown in the Summer, with some of the paths being almost impenetrable. So I hope those wearing shorts didn’t suffer too much! I did have a bit of a problem when putting out the controls with some of the punches getting tangled up (its so much easier with electronic punching!) and also a tree which must have blown over in the heavy rain the previous Sunday and was completely blocking one of the laths, so had to do a bit of gardening. As a result, I hadn’t quite got all the controls out by the 11.00 am start time, so apologies to Tony Noott who was, as far as I am aware, the only competitor who was affected by this. We had about 40 competitors and glorious weather and no complaints that I heard of. Finally thanks to Katy and Mark Dyer for their help both at Registration and also in collecting in some of the controls, and also to Dave and Denise Mullins of SARUM (I think) who also offered to collect some of the controls. As a result I didn’t have too much to do afterwards.
