Planner’s Comments – Whitaker Park

Thanks to everyone who turned out for the orienteering at Whitaker Park – I hope you enjoyed the event and the winter sunshine!

Due to the size of the park, it was difficult to plan any courses much longer than 1km, so I hope people didn’t mind that the White and Yellow courses were a little on the short side. I was very impressed by some of the fast times on these two courses, especially considering that there’s quite a climb up from the bottom of the park, to the finish near the top!

I think most people, beginners and experienced orienteers alike, had a go on at least one of the “Micr-O” courses. Again, although these were short, they were designed to be a test of accurate navigation and quick decision making. I know that some people had some problems with their results print-outs. After checking through the results back at home we worked out that this was due to some of the timers in the SI boxes being slightly out of sync. As it was taking only a matter of seconds to navigate between some of the controls, this did affect the results. We have made a couple of adjustments and have now published a full set of results which are more accurate than the splits printouts that you received on the day.

I did apply some penalties on the Micr-O courses: 30s was added to your time for punching a wrong control and 10s was added for punching an extra control.

This is the first time we have tried such Micr-O courses, so I hope you enjoyed them. If you have any feedback (with any ways to improve them, or just to say you enjoyed the courses!) please don’t hesitate to contact either myself or Hamish (email addresses available from the ‘About’ section of the website).

Finally, a big thank you to all the PFO helpers on the day, particularly Hamish and Steve Wilson who helped put out and bring in all those controls!