Radio-O at Bryanston

Yesterday I did my first Radio-O event. Amongst those taking part, the only other orienteers were WIM members Helen Bolton &  Joan Crompton. Organised by the Blackmore Vale Amateur Radio Society (BVARS), this was the first Radio-O (more properly an amateur radio direction-finding hunt) event ever held in Dorset. The event used the WIM map of the Bryanston estate and we also loaned them a set of flags and punches. Apparently although this type of activity has only reached the UK in the last couple of years, it is quite popular in Eastern Europe and also in mainland China.

Five small radio beacons are hidden out in the woods. Each of these beacons in turn emits its own particular call sign for a minute, before remaining silent for four minutes whilst in turn each of the other stations emits its signal. Competitors use a specially designed radio-receiver (either self-built or commercially produced. We used cheap and cheerful Chinese-made radios hired to us by BVARS, which incorporate a couple of aerials together with an earpiece.

As the radio picks up the signal from each radio beacon (known as foxes), rotating the radio causes the signal volume to rise and fall, giving some indication of the direction of the beacons. The signal volume also increases as you get closer to the control.

In theory you stand at a point in the forest, mark a line on your map towards the direction from this point to each beacon, then move a few hundred metres to another known point and mark the direction of the beacons again. The intersection of the lines should show the approximate position of the beacon. You then navigate to each point in turn. With care, and by moving from one place to another, you should then be able to locate each ‘fox’, and punch your control card (or even dib) before moving on to the next control.

Usually there is a time limit, perhaps 120 minutes, and different age classes are expected to find a varying number of controls in that time. For example, as an M60 I would be expected to find three controls, with the quickest to get the requisite number of controls and return to the finish being the winner. However as this was an introduction to the sport, there was no timing, other than a request that everyone was back to base by 3.00pm having started at 1.00pm.

Helen & Joan managed to get all 5 controls within the two hours. As I was unable to start until just before 2.00, I was quite happy to find the three control appropriate for my age in just over the hour at which point the rain set in and I came back to base.

An interesting experience then, and whilst I wouldn’t want to be doing this type of orienteering every week, its certainly something I might try again occasionally in the future. I think that BVARS will probably ask to use suitable local events for further DF hunts, but probably no more than once or twice a year.

Wimborne Orienteers Chairman’s Report 2006-7

 

It doesn’t seem a year since I had my arm twisted to succeed Peter Brett as WIM Chair(man) – well actually it isn’t a year, its a week short but….At the time I made it fairly clear (I thought) that I had done the job for three years in the mid ’90s was willing to do the job for for only one year this time. The fact that I’m willing to carry on indicates either the onset of senility, or the fact that the excellent members of your committee have made my job relatively pain free: I hope its the latter.

I’m going to try to be brief – you will hear enough from me in the session after the AGM, so please excuse me if I appear gloss over event from the previous year with undue haste.

As a result of our implementation of the new BOF membership structure for 2007. a number of former members, now inactive ,moved to being merely ‘Waffle subscribers’. The club membership, although healthy, thus fell below the 100 members threshold so that for the first time we became a ’small club’ for the purposes of the CompassSport competition instead of being a small ‘big club’. So instead of being thrashed by the likes of BOK and SOC in the Cup competition, we found ourselves qualifying from the regional round Harewood in March for the final of the CompassSport Trophy, which will be held next weekend . We hope that as many members as possible will be able to make the journey to Mansfield.

One of my first functions as Chairman last year was to introduce Helen Bridle to an appreciative audience of local orienteers here at Canford when she gave a presentation on her life as an international orienteer.

The CsSport event at Harewood marked one of the few appearances of Helen in the UK this year: this time she brought her boyfriend with her, Mats Haldin, a member of the Finnish team, who has also joined WIM as his British club. Mats and Helen duly won their classes , as they did a couple of months later at the York sprint race. Neither of them, sadly, is available for the CsSport finals next week.

Helen has been a fixture in the GB team for a number of years now and she and Mats both ran for their countries in the World Championships in Kiev, Ukraine, as did your chairman, who came 7th in the Paralympic class at the World Trail-O Champs. Helen failed to reach the podium this year, but Mats did, finishing 4th in the Long distance race and getting a Bronze in the men’s relay. I wonder how many other GB clubs had as many members competing in Kiev?

Domestically, many members have had success from time to time, some more than others. I should perhaps mention here Sue Hands and in particular Keith Henderson, currently top of the ranking list in M65, together with the team of Tamsin Horsler, Jo Pickering & Michelle Spillar who came 2nd in the Women’s Short class at the British relays at Blaenavon in May. Sue broke her ankle 10 days ago at an Army event – we wish her a speedy recovery.

Sue Hands was the inaugural winner of the Founders’ Trophy, named in memory of Ron Wilton, one of our founding members who died last year. In March this year we lost another stalwart, Ian Keith, the club’s first chairman, who died after short illness. Although in recent years knee trouble prevented Ian running, Ian was always happy to help at events and he remained a formidable cyclist – he would have enjoyed the Mountain Bike events we have held this year.

During last winter, driven on by Lynn Branford, the club grasped the nettle of qualifying for the Sport England Club Mark award,’a cross-sport quality accreditation for clubs with junior sections ‘ essential if we are to be able to coach juniors successfully and involve ourselves with the sport at schools level. That necessitated many changes, from the writing of club policies on all sorts of topics, to qualifying more coaches and gaining more certified First Aiders (which means that we are now in a position to staff our own First Aid at events instead of having to rely on outside bodies like St John Ambulance). members were sent on various courses (at one of the ones I attended, the Child Protection course held at Bournemouth University, I found myself older by 40 years than all the other course members, who were all university students). We also had to modernise our constitution, largely unchanged since the club’s inception, and for that we had to hold an EGM, which we did in the club tent at the CompassSport Trophy event at Harewood. The attendance was excellent – indeed I suspect that it was rather larger than at tonight’s AGM. Finally, we qualified for Club Mark (only the 13th orienteering club to do so) and were presented with the award at the JK prizegiving.

Also during the year, we have modernised the club’s image with the adoption of a new style O-top. Tim Britton took on this job. It took some some from the order going in to their arrival and Tim’s task wasn’t made any easier when our supplier, Ultrasport, returned the first batch of tops to the manufacturer, Craft of Sweden, because of shoddy workmanship. The new tops, which are very smart and comfortable, finally arrived for distribution at the JK.

Also during this year, masterminded by John & Di Tilsley, the club applied for and got Lottery funding to purchase some new SI kit for use in schools coaching. The £5 000 from the lottery, together with just over £1 000 of the club’s money, has enabled us to buy three new kits for use in developing orienteering at schools in Dorset. There are three sets, one lodged with John & Di for use in S & W Dorset, one held by Kirsty Staunton for use In E Dorset schools and in coaching at Moors Valley, and one lodged with The Branford family & me for use in N Dorset. This new kit is primarily intended for schools use but it will also be used for schools league events and for major club events in conjunction with our existing SI & computer kit which continues to be held and maintained by Cris & Mike Tween. The kit can be booked by members for use in schools & youth groups and there will be a section on the Message Board of the website where you can see what the booking are.

The Message Board is a new feature of the website this year and after a slow start, is being increasingly used. It has enabled members to post details of events, activities and photographs of events

Gaining Clubmark and doing coaching in schools doesn’t mean that we automatically gain more junior members and as a club we are increasingly short of active juniors and this is a problem which we as a club, will have to address this year. We’ve also gained an award of up to £400 for junior development , which includes not just a grant towards mapping small areas suitable schools use (we have an area in SW Dorset in mind) but will also allow us to award free junior membership of British Orienteering to children competing in our schools league who show promise in the sport.

Over the past year the club has put on 21 events of various types, 1 Regional event, 1 SW Galoppen (last weekend,which I missed….), 1 relay, 2 night events, a number of smaller scale local Sunday events, 1 Dorset Schools championships, 8 mid-week events which formed the summer mid-week league,and for the first time ever, 2 MTBO events held very successfully at Moors Valley at Trevor Bridle’s instigation. We also planned, organised & staffed two days of Trail-O at this year’s JK in the Forest of Dean.

There is currently great pressure on our sport to change and modernise our structure. Much of this is driven by the fact that much of our funding comes from Sport England. They are changing their structure. As a results, unless orienteering adapts accordingly, we may lose much of the funding which pays for our central administration and supports our athletes in international competition. Orienteering is not an Olympic sport, and with pressure on finances in sport leading up to 2012, any non-Olympic sport not conforming with the current fashions is likely to lose its funding. There are far reaching changes proposed in both the structure of British Orienteering, which is becoming a limited company but also the event structure of the sport is under review and will shortly be discussed at a BOF conference attended by our hard -working secretary.

As we all know, participation has fallen since the heigh of popularity of the sport in the 1980’s. Our current structure of events is still based on that model, which is now becoming unsustainable and we must be prepared to adapt to some far-reaching changes if the sport we know is to survive. British Orienteering is instigating a wide-spread review of all our orienteering activities as it develops a Whole Sport Plan for 2009-13 and the first task of the new committee will be to go through the paperwork this has generated.

Next month on Sunday November 18th, the club, together with Sarum and with assistance from WSX, is staging the British Schools Championships at Cranes Moor, Bovington with event on the Saturday at Gore Heath and Coldharbour. It will be all hands on deck for the next few weeks as we prepare for this.

I hope that I haven’t missed out anything else of great importance – If so I apologise.

No event can take place without a lot of work by volunteer officials and on your behalf I would at this time like to thank publicly all those of you who have mapped, planned, organised, computed or helped in any way at our events over this last year We are lucky that we have so many members who help willingly when approached, and also a hard core of hard-working,youthful, allegedly ‘retired’ members who seem to be almost full time orienteering administrators. Without these folk, the club would not be able to function in the way it does and I thank you all for your involvement.

The French 5 Days

Its been a long time since I wrote a posting. The JK in April was fantastic, the Trail-O went well, everyone in WIM did their bit, the weather was wonderful. What did i write – nothing.

However, it has been a very wet summer and one of my abiding memories so far is of the walking club tent I captured on Day 2 of the French 5 Days.

Waiting for the European Trail-O Champs’ Model event to begin, we were sitting in the Car Park at Carcans in a horrendous rain storm. As the rain lashed down and cold and miserable orienteers wandered past us, searching for their cars, a large red caterpillar (in reality a club tunnel tent protecting at least 16 people) led by a figure under an umbrella, shambled past us. I had to get out of the car to capture it and got immediately soaked to the skin, but it was worth it.

“Does my ear have mud in it?”

For the last four weeks or so,during February and early March, we’ve had more than our fair share of rain, and its affected the sport in many different ways.

A month ago, some of us went to a small event which QO held on Ham Hill near Yeovil. Now Ham Hill, or most of it, is a delightful area. The hill having been quarried for hundreds of years to provide the lovely yellowish “Ham” stone with which the villages around it have been built, the top is a maze of humps and hollows, great technical orienteering which hosted the British Short Race Championships a few years ago. To the west is a wooded spur which is usually fine and which provides a change from the technical stuff. Unfortunately, in wet weather it is very muddy, and because it is so steep, progress down the hill, particularly on the paths, proceeds in a series of glissades, as on a snow slope.

As any mountaineer knows, there are three types of glissade, the standing, the sitting and the involuntary, and they usually follow each other in rapid order. The less agile amongst us wondered why the planner hadn’t made greater use of the the top of the hill and less use of the less technical, steeper slopes, but then, he wasn’t gifted with hindsight. There were lots of mud covered runners in the car park at the end of the event. Lynn Branford, her back resplendently mud covered from shoulder to knee, asked the question which heads this article. She wasn’t the only one.

The following week, our regional event at Ibsley was lucky to be held in dry weather. What is more, we had the use of parking on hard standing in an industrial estate. We hadn’t been able to find a suitable parking field for the event and had to resort to using buses. The only downside in bussing competitors to the start is the problems it causes families with young children who need split starts, but in the middle of a very wet month we were lucky – if we had been using a field for parking, there was no way it would have been possible.

The week after, those club members who went to the national event at White Downs near Dorking had the same trouble with the involuntary glissading on the steep slopes as we’d had at Ham Hill. They also had to undergo bussing to the event and ran in continuous rain and their waterproof maps also managed to absorb at least some of the mud every time they fell, which meant that they were getting difficult to read by the end. They were, however, mollified by the provision of hot showers back at the parking area.

I wasn’t there, choosing instead to visit the Forest of Dean to complete the planning of one of the Trail-O courses Keith Henderson and I are doing for the JK at Easter. It didn’t rain, but there was plenty of mud. At one point I had to cross an area next to a forest road which contractors felling an area had churned up so that it resembled the Somme and I managed a spectacular pratfall headfirst into a muddy puddle.It was my turn to have mud in my ear. Fortunately I met no-one in the forest and had dried out by the time I got back to the car.

Finally, last week, with the help of Lynn Branford, I controlled the SOC colour coded event associated with the annual New Forest Long-O. Although the heavy rain had left areas of the forest looking like the Florida Everglades, putting out and checking the controls in the sunshine on the Saturday was a joy. Sadly, on the day of the event, the heavens wept all day, the rain beginning as the officials began setting up at 8.00am and continuing relentlessly thereafter. But it remained warm and those people who did turn up (I guess the attendance was almost halved because of the weather) knew what they were in for before they started, dressed accordingly and finished all smiles at the relief of having survived.

I’m hoping for better conditions these next few weeks. But the waterproofs are in the car boot just in case.

Constitutional Matters

The club’s constitution needs updating and modernising. The committee have approved a new version, which needs to be adopted before the end of March. Accordingly, we have decided to call an Extraordinary General Meeting, to be held at the CompassSport trophy event, when a large proportion of the club membership will be present. But why the rush: can’t it wait for the next AGM in October? Let me explain.

A couple of years ago now, the club decided that we ought to try to gain the Sport England Clubmark award. This is largely designed to ensure that those clubs with a junior membership or with club/school links are aware of the various issues involved, that all their coaches are properly trained, are CRB checked, and that ‘best practice’ is observed in the club’s activities. Some local authorities are beginning to suggest that only clubs who have gained Clubmark should have club/school links. As we run a schools orienteering league, clearly we should be seen to be doing the right thing.

WIM are now in a position where we have reached the point of submitting our application to British Orienteering. This needs to be done before April to keep us within the correct timescales. The previous constitution was devised when the club was first put on an official footing in, I think, 1970. Since then, attitudes have changed, and the constitution needs to reflect modern ideas on topics like equity, grievance procedures etc. In addition, British Orienteering has recently changed its membership structure and our constitution needs to reflect this too.

Accordingly, I have produced a new version of the constitution, which is largely our original model, but incorporating changes suggested by Sport England, who provide a suggested model club constitution template. Where we differered from this model, we’ve stuck to our own version except where changes were needed to bring us up to date. The committee have approved the final draft, which is on the club website.

If any other members have any suggested amendments or additions to this, please let us have them for consideration as soon as possible. We have one further committee meeting before the EGM.

Mapping

Before this year I had only ever drawn one proper orienteering map before, back in my NGOC days. It was of Cleeve Hill and it wasn’t very good. I’m no artist, the base maps were two OS sheets, one of 1:10 000, the other the old six-inch to the mile version, 1: 10560. This meant that the contours didn’t meet where the maps overlapped and any complicated bits, like those round the old quarries, were left as white space. Air photos were prohibitively expensive. Pushed for time and a novice surveyor, I didn’t make a particularly good job of interpreting and filling in the gaps. Later versions of this map had Harvey’s pg plot, which made the mapper’s job much, much easier. Drawing was done with pen and ink on drafting film

 

After that, I was happy to do the odd bit of surveying, but I left the drawing to other, more fastidious souls. When OCAD came out, I played with the demo versions and sometimes used them to set courses or even to amend original map files, but nothing more.

 

Until this autumn. Di Tilsley, on the verge of departing for New Zealand for the winter, was asked by a local school if she could do an update of their school map. She didn’t have time, but contacted me as the nearest club member, to see if I could help. They might even pay me for my efforts. At the same time, I realised I needed to update the Clayesmore map before the upcoming night event and I discovered that Erik Peckett was running a mapping course for Sarum involving the use of the now free OCAD6 program and they had room for a few more.

 

And suddenly, I had drawn two maps. Two quick visits to the primary school, one to survey, and one to check and correct, followed by the Clayesmore map from scratch. Emboldened by the ease of drawing now I understood how to use OCAD properly, I had decided to redraw both maps from scratch rather than modifying the existing files.

 

So what now. Well, with the increasing popularity of Sprint-O, this summer we are hoping to organise some Wednesday evening events mainly using updated versions of the the street maps which John Warren produced during the Foot & Mouth outbreak in 2001 which kept us out of the forests for four months or so. I thought I would try doing my own map of Sturminster Newton.

 

‘Stur’ may not be an Italian hill town like the ones Helen Bridle was running in early last year on the Park World Tour but it has quite an interesting street network. There have been lots of new houses built recently on the northern side of the town, but with the help of Google maps and aerial photos from Windows Live Local, I was able to plot most of the new roads which have appeared. The architecture of Prince Charles’ Poundbury has a lot to answer for round here but it has at least made the newer housing developments more interesting and produced a few interesting alleyways. The town council has also recently upgraded all the footpaths, signs and gates and with the town sitting on a ridge surrounded by the Stour on three sides, it also gives us the opportunity of orienteering on the water meadows down by the river.

 

I thought mapping it all might keep me out of mischief and give me a bit of exercise over the Christmas period. And so it did until today. By then I had completed mapping all the urban areas, and the footpath network All that remained was the new developments still going up on the site of the old cattle market of happy memory, which should be completed by the summer, and the riverside meadows which I had set aside to map between Christmas and the New Year.

 

However I had not reckoned on the weather being quite as inclement. By the time there was a gap in the clouds, the Stour had burst its banks (as it often does at this time of the year) and all the areas I needed to check were under two feet of water. So the project is on hold until all has dried out again. Still, there’s no rush. And hopefully, the water will have gone down by summer.

Somerley Park

Yesterday was one of those very rare days when we got to run on a new map of an area, within our geographical catchment area, which has never been used for orienteering before. And what a pleasure it was, on an unexpectedly sunny and warm autumnal day.

Usually events these days are on well known area (Moors Valley) or an old area under a new name. Mount Ararat appeared a couple of years ago, but turned out to be part of Ringwood North in disguise.

When John Warren first got permission to map the area from The Somerley Estate and Lord Normanton, it looked as if we had got quite a large new area, big enough for a Galoppen. Later, as the mapping progressed, it became clear that most of the wooded area flattered to deceive. Whilst looking OK from the road edges, apart from a nice bit of runnable woodland which was out of bounds to orienteering because it is used by paintballers, most of the forest was so densely infested with rhododendron as to be virtually useless for orienteering, and most of the open areas were taken up by the golf course or being excavated for gravel extraction.

However, when we also got permission to use the open parkland between the big house and the river, we had enough of an area at the northern end of the estate to take smaller local events and yesterday’s event was the first time most people had seen it. It proved very attractive – ideal for the juniors but very fast and with enough detail to ensure that a loss of concentration meant time was lost. It looks an ideal relay area (possibly for the Furrow Hoppers but I could see it being usable for a conventional relay race) or for Park-O/Sprint-O.

The map still needs a bit of tweaking. Few new maps are right first time, and we’ve got one or two areas, hurriedly mapped last month once we found we were able to use them after all, which can be improved upon now that the bracken is dying down and we can see a bit more detail.

Meanwhile, what of the large green area of fight to the south of the area we used yesterday. Well, it has a good and well defined track network and it has occurred to the club that, if we added it to existing maps of the Ringwood forests, we would have an area which would be a superb venue for a Mountain Bike orienteering event. MTBO events are quite popular in the North of England, but there are very few events in the south and WIM has a number of dedicated cyclists amongst its members: watch this space.

Lottery Grant for new club SI kit

Lottery Grant for new club SI kit

In mid 2006, the committee began looking at ways to extend or replace its stock of SI control boxes by purchasing some of the newer, smaller & more user friendly boxes: we decided to replace the old stock at the rate of about 10 boxes per annum for the next 5-6 years. The older boxes have been heavily used and we expect to have a few fail each year from now on. The newer ones are easier to manage, which aids the burden placed on Cris Tween, have a much greater battery life and should thus be more economical to run.

Furthermore, because they don’t need to be programmed every time they are used, but just have to have a time-master box put over them to make sure they are all synchronised to the same time, Cris won’t have to re-program them every time they get used. Synchronisation can be done by the planner.

At about the same time, John & Di Tilsley proposed that we should be looking at getting an SI schools pack which could be used for by the club and also by the schools in the very successful schools league they have run in S. Dorset for the last 15 years ago. This mini-league runs for about 6 weeks in the second half of the Spring term, using maps of school grounds produced by Di (who has mapped over 130 Dorset schools in the last few years) with events after school, mid-week, finishing with a final event at Nothe Fort in Weymouth. For the last few years, the club SI team have helped to provide the computing for this final.

You will also remember Di’s article in Waffle last year detailing her schools mapping and asking for support in running schools events in Dorset.

As a result, after discussions with the committee, John Tilsley produced the specifications for a bid for Lottery funds, the purpose being for the club to use the equipment mainly for schools development and junior coaching/training as well as for club events.

We heard recently that we had received a substantial grant, to which the club is also adding a significant amount, the money we had set on one side to spend on new boxes.

With all this money, we are purchasing the equivalent of three school sets. Each school set has enough boxes for 10 controls as well as the usual Clear/Check/Start/Finish boxes, 20 dibbers & a thermal printer. WIM already have plenty of dibbers so we have opted to replace the dibbers in the sets with more boxes. The equipment will usually be divided as follows:-

One set kept in the Poole/Weymouth area maintained by John & Di, and used by them for their coaching work.

One set kept in E Dorset, to be used mainly for schools coaching, junior coaching, work at Moors Valley etc.

One set to be kept in the Blandford area, to be used mainly for schools development in N Dorset.

Cris Tween will hold any remaining new boxes along with the rest of the club stock.

This will enable us to use the sets singly in schools, with the option of adding extra boxes from the club stock if necessary.

By adding two or three sets together we have sufficient equipment for Schools League/Local events.

By adding the equipment to the existing stock we have the necessary equipment for big events without having to borrow kit from other clubs (eg for the Caddihoe Chase, we had to borrow kit from Devon & Kerno)

The older boxes, having less heavy use, should now last a lot longer before they give up the ghost.

The order has been placed and we hope the new equipment will be available before Christmas

Hello world!

Apparently the traditional greeting when you start a new blog. Why should I be any different?