ITOC2006 – Planner’s Commentary

My thanks to FermO for letting me piggyback ITOC on the Northern Ireland Champs. I had previously considered Bull Island, Carlingford and Belvedere as possible venues and discarded them as not providing the technical conditions worthy of a championship (although I was delighted to see Frank Ryan putting on TrailO at the ParkO Champs). In the event I feel that the physical nature of the NIOC courses and the lateness in the year kept the TrailO entries low. It’s thanks to those who took on the challenge and especially to those who travelled across from England specifically for the event. It’s noticeable that their placings favour the top end of the results, showing that the Irish TrailO experience has some way to go.

When I first visited Lough Navar I was doubtful about being able to provide a reasonable standard of event amongst such untidy vegetation but as time went on the control sites started to show up and I hope folks felt the challenge to be worthwhile. The nature of the area reflects the low incidence of contour-related controls.

I am indebted to Frank Swift for taking up the Controller duties. The TrailO Controller has to act very much as the friend of the competitor by reigning in the devious excesses of the Planner’s mind. Frank, while admitting he was along for a TrailO planning master-class (hope he felt he got it!), made me articulate the reasoning behind the flag sitings, which proved invaluable for the final fine-tuning.

Thank you also to my on-the-day helpers, all friends and relatives down from Belfast for the day.

Control 1 (40% correct) – due to the condition of the vegetation on both sides of the track the only usable features low down in the course were the ditch crossings. Because the ditches were all culverted and therefore fairly indistinct I decided to check that competitors were map-reading from the start rather than looking for decision point markers. It would seem that quite a few weren’t! Whilst the cluster appeared to be testing for “edge of” and “in” the feature it was, in fact, on the ditch preceding that which was circled on the map – a classic “Z” control.

Control 2 (45%) – whilst the correct flag (on the ditch bend) was easy to identify as the rightmost you had to look around by almost 160° to locate the “A” flag of the cluster on the other side of the track. It would seem that quite a few competitors didn’t check the “A-D” code on their control description!

Control 3 (60%) – a technically straightforward control provided you could identify the vegetation boundaries, remembering that the notes informed you that, in woodland, they were at the tree base.

Control 4 (45%) – this was the reason that the distances between the decision points and the punches had been so great. I was hoping that competitors would “switch off” their map reading until the punch for control 3 had been encountered and so fail to notice that they had passed the knoll circled on the map. The three flags were made to look like a test of finding the centre of a symbolically represented feature and all of those who didn’t recognise the “Z” option correctly chose the centre flag as their answer – pity about the placement of the circle!

Control 5 (60%) – flag “A” was merely a distraction to widen the field of view. The trick was to recognise that flag “D” was placed against the edge of the dark green vegetation patch and that flag “B” was closed by the knoll. This allowed the relative position of the marsh to be fixed in the terrain, even if the ground vegetation couldn’t be identified.

Control 6 (90%) – Whilst all 3 controls were on some part of the spur, the correct flag could be identified from the shape of the spur and from distance estimation from the track.

Control 7 (40%) – The re-use of two of the flags from the previous control was intended merely as a distraction as they didn’t figure in the decision. It was necessary to identify that flag “B” was on the slope shown by the form line – that wasn’t the edge of the pit.

Control 8 (40%) – The classic parallel feature control. While the flags were clustered on a hill and its neighbouring pseudo-hill a check on the track/hill distance on the map revealed that the circled hill was much farther into the forest. In fact, it couldn’t be seen from the track!

Control 9 (15%) – This was a distance estimation test. There were three flags on the north side of the gully (the fourth was introduced to give the appearance of a parallax test) and the middle of them was a measured distance along the track from the boulder which was shown on the edge of the circle (which was actually broken to emphasise it).

Control 10 (85%) – The placement of the decision point was deliberately done to force competitors left for a clearer view up the hill and so into a parallax switch. Didn’t fool too many! Flags “A” and “C” were placed in a region which was mapped as a boulder field so whilst they were beside boulders they couldn’t be referenced that way in the control description.

Control 11 (85%) – A technically easy control for the first excursion into the open areas. Care had to be taken over parallax as the angle of view was extremely small.

Control 12 (80%) – A switch to a long view control after all the close-ups in the forest. The vegetation edge upon which flag “D” was placed obscured the full extent of the open area so the map had to be believed. I was also using the relatively unfamiliar “open area” in the control description.

Control 13 (80%) – An intention to confuse by re-using the flags of control 12 and having one of them disappear within the few metres between decision points 12 and 13. Also the “A” and “B” flags of control 12 were now “B” and “A”.

Control 14 (90%) – The trick was to spot that the ditch ended beyond the tree canopy, the edge of which was the mapped vegetation boundary (remember the note), and then take care over parallax.

Control 15 (55%) – The decision point was very carefully placed to ensure that the ruin’s western corner was obscured by a tree. Two paces to the left would have revealed that all the flags were on the eastern side of the ruin.

Control 16 (45%) – The ultimate long distance control at 150 metres! Since it was impossible to look along the fence it was necessary to resort to line of sight. This was relatively easy to spot because the bramble patch (and its left-hand edge) was in front of the fence. Furthermore flags “C” and “D” could be eliminated by reference to the isolate tree just over the fence, although this was tricky to spot on the map because it was in a reduced visibility screen.

Control 17 (45%) – The landform was made confusing by the ditch cutting the spur, but no-one went for “A” or “B”. The information to be used here was the extent of the reduced visibility vegetation – it was very clear that flag “D” was the only one outside this.

Control 18 (45%) – This made use of the fact that the control description specification for “open area” doesn’t distinguish between open and rough open so by having no discriminator in column C both the rough open and open regions were to be treated as the area, thus eliminating flags “B” and “C”. Looking at the ground cover flag “A” (deliberately placed under the competitor’s nose) would appear not to be in the corner. However as the boundary between wooded and open areas was the tree canopy (as per the competitors’ notes) it was carefully placed with reference to the canopy.

Control 19 (100%) – Fooled no one! Flag “C” was placed on a ghost ditch between the track and the earth wall (it may well have been the ditch before the area deteriorated) but everyone recognised the distance from the track to the ditch junction.

Control T1 (70%) – A fussy map to help cause confusion. The ditch junction marked by flag “B” was the southwestern by a mere whisker over “C”.

Control T2 (70%) – A wide-open control compared with its predecessor. The vegetation boundary could have been described by anything from northwest to southeast. I chose the former to provide the maximum variation from the northeast description of the vegetation tip. The trick was to spot that flags “C” and “D” were on the line of trees forming the western edge of the deciduous and that “C” was farther from the track than “B”