Saltoun Wood SoSOL
Sunday 27th November 2022

Event Report

Our thanks as usual to the many helpers who worked hard to stage the event – particularly to our Planner, Sheila Strain, and Paul Caban of Interlopers as Controller.

Thanks also to Trina for arranging permissions, toilets and other advance preparations and for the String course map, and to Max Baillie and family for the string course pictures. Also particular thanks to Robin who ran download all day single-handed, and to Saartje who raised £60 for Mary’s Meals from the coffee stall.

The event budget was not intended to cover the full cost of the remapping so we hope for many more events in our toughest forest.

Planner’s Report

You may have thought it was rough and tough in parts but it was a whole lot worse in September when the bracken was over my head in places! It has become much nicer in the past couple of weeks. 

The vegetation on the old map was well out of date, but planning had to be done on that map as the new map arrived less than three weeks ago, only two weeks before the courses had to go to print and therefor some adjustments to control sites had to be done at the last minute to fit with the new map.  Extra special thanks to controller, Paul, for having to fit in with such a tight time-line for checking the control sites on the map and on the ground and for spotting a few inconsistencies. The new Lidar base map certainly helped as my GPX tracks fitted perfectly and when the earlier tracks were superimposed on the new map showed up where I had been.  There are areas which were runnable on the old map and I had to find out the hard way by trying to go through them that some have become somewhat less so, whereas a few nicer bits have opened up. 

The start had to be on a path for the White and Yellow courses and I had investigated various ways of getting everyone else into the forest and positioned the start kite where it seemed best.  I had attempted to stamp out a trod, and marked it with tape streamers but some of the early starters were disadvantaged by not seeing the streamers or not realising their significance.  Extra tape was added when we realised but in retrospect perhaps there could have been some way of showing on the map where the trod emerged into the forest as the mapped ditch is under the ‘Arwen’ trees.

Thank you to Murray and Tessa who went out to Humbie wood and the railway line with the last 20 SI units on Saturday morning (the kites had been out since earlier in the week) and so allowed me to get to compete in Haddington, and to the team of control collectors – Pete Brownsort, Pete Younger, Duncan Edmonson and Ross Lyall – who managed to get all the controls in before dark. 

Thank you also to ESOC for the loan of the kites as the ELO ones were in use in Haddington.

Sheila

Controller’s Report

Results

• Simple results are here.
• Routegadget allows you to plot your route, either by hand or by downloading a gpx file from a watch or phone and to look where you and others went.
• Winsplits Online gives another way of comparing your times for each leg.
• British Orienteering collect results from all events and publish ranking scores for larger events.
• SoSOL Tables