We hope everyone enjoyed the fantastic weather we organized for the event and hope you all stayed upright on those treacherous paths.

We wanted challenging courses with good tehnique & navigation rewarded, & tried to keep people off paths as far as possible, while still providing some longer legs with route choice. Routegadget will show us whether or not we succeeded, please put your routes up!

With the late move of the champs to Beaudesert after permissions were withdrawn from Hednesford Hills we were worried about familiarity after the National, but Beaudesert is becoming one of the toughest most technical areas in the West Midlands as the forest slowly matures from dense young saplings to large stands of pine, keeping everyone on their toes. With this comes the challenge of keeping the map up to date as blocks of forest become runnable again after perhaps 20 years of inaccessibility. There are areas of the map that still need some work and we will pass these on to Doug, but it will be a constant updating process going forward in this working forest.

Control 17 on the Blue, Control 12 on the Green.
This control site was the subject of a complaint at the national event, and although we were aware the complaint was not upheld, we were not aware of the full ruling by the jury which said that the control site was right, but the control should not be used again until the area was re-surveyed and mapped. If we had known this, we would not have used the control site as it stands.

It was designed to be a very difficult control at the end of a tough course to try to catch people out when tired. We have both been out this afternoon and re-run the leg again and chatted to many about it.
Our conclusions are:
1) It is a very difficult control with few attckpoints, particularly on the Blue relying on a long bearing across difficult low visibility, rough forest or a safer approach from the south or north.
2) The pit is possibly marked a couple of millimeters too far up the hill when approached from the east, but it would be difficult to confirm this without judicous use of plastic bags and a sighting compass. It feels perhaps too close to the open to the south.
3) Its position in relation to the ditches to the west is correct.
4) There is some unmarked broken ground in the vicinity.

We both think the control is fair but very hard, particularly when tired minds encounter it at the end of a course.

One more quick apology, we definitely started collecting in some controls too early and one competitor was left floundering at a control site which had been collected (which he later punched in the hands of the collector). We have looked at the splits and given him what we think is a fair split time for this control.

We have a suggestion going forward on this. Descriptions should be marked with 'Controls collected from .....' rather than courses close at....' but we unfortunately didn’t put either on!

Thanks to our merry control collectors for pulling them all in.

Happy New Year and wish you all the best of luck in competitions in 2010,

Stodge and Cath.