Note
9 hours out there today, starting with unlocking the gate for the coffee van at 7:30am and finishing with locking a different gate at 4:30pm after collecting the last of the model event's mini-flags (I should have had a way of capturing information on how many people actually made use of these...). Because of having a remote start and finish, both across the other side of 100km/hr road from the parking/arena, a lot of signage/taping was required today, but it seems to have all worked out ok, especially as people had to go past the finish on the way to the start and national parks had conveniently cut a gap in the fence at the road-crossing point (for the benefit of an MTB race a couple of weeks ago). And the overnight rain had cleared to a gloriously sunny day.
I'd tried to optimise technical navigation without *too* much physical challenge, and even offered a 65AS class which got reasonable uptake, and although there were still a few long times there were also pretty decent winning times and very few mispunches. Possibly we could have had a 3rd (even shorter) moderate course though...people may have complained about the vegetation but I didn't hear anyone say that any controls were in the wrong place - because they weren't. And actually there was a reasonable amount of complimentary feedback about the courses :)
This weekend's earworm: Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, for all my Victorian friends - I'd so hoped that this event would be the SA/Vic Challenge, but instead it became the SA vs SA Challenge, which was still fairly popular - it's a long time since we had more than 100 people for state champs. I do feel a bit bad that the likely M45 winner inadvertently sabotaged his own challenge by running straight past his last control; in my attempt to make sure that none of the little kids missed seeing where the finish was, I'd made it stand out far more obviously than a mere control flag 100m away!