Note
Day of Reckoning, Moment of Truth, etc etc.
The Aust Long Champs day dawned bright and breezy and when I got to the assembly area at 7:30am there was already one person in a campervan waiting to get into the parking paddock! Next half hour was spent redoing the signage at the turnoff into Gravel Pit Rd as 3 out of the 4 "Caution: Traffic Turning" signs which I'd put out last thing yesterday, had been nicked overnight. Then I took the maps to the start and observed the setup and timing very closely, then I set up the easy/very easy start, then I hung around in close proximity to the finish tent for about 4 hours and thankfully there was no major trouble to shoot. Then I helped Jeffa with the presentations, then Susanne/Lachlan/Fern/George and others helped me & Vincent with control collecting. It was beautiful up on the hillside in the afternoon sunlight. When we came back it should have been really easy to sort out the units which needed to go back to Vic & NSW but the puzzling thing was that the 7 spare units which I'd left right next to the SI unit boxes were nowhere to be found. Eventually it turned out that the computing team had helpfully packed them away and taken them home with the SA units!
So, we finally left the event about 5:30 and I had time to reflect on the day & debrief to George over coffee. VIncent's courses and Paul's mapping were very well received, Jeffa's organisation was superb, the arena was perfect for an Aust champs and so was the weather. So I think we can all be really proud of ourselves, and there were only a couple of less-than-perfect moments (inside my controller's hat).
Control 160 messed with a few people because we had described the middle boulder, there being 5 in total across the circle, but the control was on the 3rd in a row of 3 that stretched halfway across the circle. To make things slightly more complicated there is an unmapped boulder tucked under the olive tree thicket, which Vincent and I had originally taken to be that 3rd boulder until I realised that what we'd taken to be rocky ground at the SE edge of the thicket was what Paul had mapped as the 3rd boulder. So we had to put the control on the southeasternmost rock in that row even though it didn't then match the description of 2m boulder very well. If I'd caught on to this sooner we may not have used it as a control site -sorry!
The other contentious thing was having no water on the 4.2km course 12 (M55AS, M75A, W45AS, W65A). We had reasoned that with a 40-minute winning time, and even if the bulk of the people on the course took closer to an hour, having water available at the start & finish was adequate. I didn't anticipate that there would be quite so many people in the 80-100 minute range who went a long time without a drink, and I can see that for these people if they were out in the sun, they would have been thirsty even though it was a cool day, so I'll learn from that for next time.
The slightly odd thing was that a number of women (W50 or 55?) came in saying that they had found the pink tag for 106 even though there was no control there. I said "But did you go to 106 - the drink control on a boulder cluster on the spur?". Eventually I elicited from them that they had overshot the spur and had found the tag on a boulder in the next gully over, and I elicited from Vincent that this had been his original site for 106, although it was eliminated by the time I came along to check the tags, so I'd never been there!