Note
"A Silk Purse From A Sow's Ear"
Got to the arena about 8am, ran around putting out radio SI units, drove up to Tower Hill to place the mobile data unit, set up the spectator control with the elites' drinks and made sure that the OOB area for wedding setup next to it was correct, then mostly hung around the finish to keep an eye on mispunches, not that there were many (although I did feel a bit bad for anyone who punched 116 instead of 176 or vice versa - they were on boulders 90m apart along the same creekline) and suddenly it was time to set up the presentations already, so the first opportunity I had to realise that more than one of the shorter courses had been too short, was when I was handed a list of the placegetters.
There don't seem to have been any quibbles about control placement, though, and many people said that they appreciated the route choice legs which Vincent had set them. Spent 3 hours on control collecting - it took 2 trips up Tower Hill to bring back all the water (much of which hadn't been used but if the day had been sunny as originally forecast, it could have been another story) and got the last of my allocation of 17 just on sunset. We were lucky to have some interstate volunteers, as it means that Vincent & I don't have to collect any controls on Sunday!
By the time I got home I was so tired that I was practically driving on autopilot, but I was also (w)racking my brains to work out how I could have made such a rookie error as to have the W60/W16 course 33% too short in terms of the recommended winning time. Geoff was on the road to Nhill (or is it the Nhill road - who's seen that movie?) for a trailer exchange but our house guest (I haven't been a very good host this past week) kindly let me debrief, and in the end I came to the following conclusions:
1) the km rate for courses which were primarily in the open/mature pine forest was a lot faster than we had anticipated; Vincent and I had thought it wouldn't be significantly different from track options or the open farmland on Tower Hill which longer courses traversed, and any courses we test-ran had a mixture of terrains so we never specifically tested just the forest near the arena.
2) because the forest was so open, and the available control sites limited, there was very little opportunity for wider route choices on these courses, or likelihood of error on the control sites. We were aware of this, but just didn't have the same sort of technically/physically challenging terrain as Bathurst or Stanthorpe available to us. We had given some thought to making these courses a bit longer, but couldn't find a way to add distance without reducing the navigational difficulty and insulting people's intelligence.
3) because the Tower Hill ridgeline forms a natural barrier, and has very little in the way of useable features immediately over the ridgeline, it was possible to form good courses in the 6km+ range (after a lot of hard work by Vincent, who really did make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the saying goes) and likewise for around 4km distance closer to the arena, but not easy to achieve lengths in between unless we made people go up to the ridgeline and then immediately come back down again, which they definitely would have complained about.
I've often commented that there is no penalty (except censure) for getting the winning times incorrect, but do feel that as a fairly experienced controller I should have known better. It certainly would have helped to have more time to focus on these courses instead of being so tied up with the club relays...