Hainault Forest (Regional)
Results | Routegadget | Report
Organiser, Iain Ambler
Our return to Hainault Forest after 7 years away went very smoothly. The sun shone and the gorse glowed. The competitors I spoke to had all enjoyed their runs. Hope yourr run was enjoyable too. A fine spring day for orienteering.
Thanks to all CHIG helpers who turned out in force; and in particular to Ray W, for getting Live Results working today on a trial basis and for help and advice leading up to the event; to Tony for hours of mapping and for controlling; and to Jacob, for planing the courses, help to ensure the event went ahead, and his nothing is too much trouble attitude, much appreciated.
A black SILVA compass case was left at the event. If it’s yours, contact me at iainambler15@gmail.com. Finally, of course our thanks to George and Claire and the teams of the Woodland Trust and Redbridge Vision for letting us use the beautiful Hainault Forest again.
Planner, Jacob Stevens
I hope you all enjoyed our return to Hainault Forest. Although it has a lot of brambles and is somewhat lacking in open woodland, it’s a decent area for orienteering, with a good variety of terrain and some deceptively tricky areas. I tried to ensure that the more difficult courses included plenty of changes of leg style and terrain, with some legs having route choice and others requiring fine navigation. Blue and brown courses also included a change of scene, with fast simpler legs across the open land to the southern ridge (whose pleasant open runnable woodland hopefully made up for the lack of technical difficulty) and back into the main forest, designed to test concentration after a stretch of faster running. Environmental restrictions prevented our use of the NE area, which constrained the longest courses somewhat, but I hope you felt the courses avoided excessive repetition.
It was great to receive feedback on the courses – both positive and constructive. Several competitors remarked that they enjoyed the changes of leg style throughout the longer courses. There were a couple of comments that some legs on yellow were too difficult, which I discussed with the controller and reviewed against the BOF rules/guidelines. I agree that leg 4 was above TD2 difficulty, as it had multiple sensible route options. I feel the other two (9 and 10) were within the TD2 skill set, which includes “[navigate along] very distinct vegetation boundaries” and “leave a line feature to go to a visible control site near to it, then return to that line feature”, and helped make the yellow course more than simply a sequence of TD1 controls with decision points between them. As someone quite new to planning, I really appreciate such comments, as they help me better understand how to apply the rules in practice. Please do upload your route to RouteGadget, as I find it very interesting to see the route choices (and mistakes) that people made, and I’m sure many other competitors do too.
Many thanks to Tony for his invaluable guidance and for producing an excellent updated map; Iain for being such a well-organised organiser; George, Claire & teams from the Woodland Trust and Vision for working constructively with us to manage the environmental impact of the event; Harold for putting out controls; and Joe, Kostya, Mark, Tom & Tony for collecting them.
