Discussion: Well done

Nice report. Rogaine went sort of okay too ;-)
Seeing the trouble you had with 76 makes me feel vindicated in dropping it when we were at 35 - just looked like we'd either be very careful and middle it, or be very careful then miss it and piss around doing a grid search for a while. Since we are not good at concentrating when there are no contours we probably got it right!

First is a first - great work. Don't worry about who could've done better if they'd entered, it's about performing at the event. :-)

Thanks - yup 76 was a dog control!

And don't worry I'm well aware winning is winning - just ask Juffs ;)

Teehee....tell me again how you nearly found the wrong first control? :)

:) yes well :P

Yep - 76 was a bingo control. There is a track within a few hundred meters which may have been it's only saving grace but given the enormous amount of tracks out there not marked on the map, maybe it wasn't a saving grace. After all, a rogaine map is a mud map.

I was short of time, and full of CBF when setting - which is probably a really bad mind set to have when setting. In the back of my mind I had a thought "would the vetters flag it?" which is really unfair. If you have that thought, don't set it. The vetters did an awesome job given I gave them so little time. My fellow setter, John C, by his own admission, was out of his depth and was relying on my experience to lead it. I put myself in that situation and I had a couple of possibly unwitting conspirators. That is no reflection on them. They were forever cheerful and positive and worked hard.

That control was not the only one I would have red flagged if I was in a better frame of mind.

On the whole, I'm feeling that people are being very kind about the event. Sure, the controls may have been in the right spot but were a lot of them fair for people using (mud) map and compass?

TBH I thought it was well set and well vetted - the controls where in the right locations and it was just a hard tough rogaine in that territory.

Was there a few dubious controls yes sure - but there always are. 76 was probably the only one which was a tad too dubious for my liking however had we held our bearing or relocated correctly we would have got it - so just as much a lesson for us. Was frustrating at the time but all in all I think the course was godo - was also achievable so really good.

The course we set we would have only dropped a little had my ankle and shoe not gone and had we not lost an hour on this control - realistically there was 2 hours or so which was wasted and probably another 1hrs worth of slow movement over the last 6 horus. In those 3 hours add another 12 km and your up to 95 of the 92 was planned, so maybe only dropping 2 or 3 controls once you take into account you never hit the straight line distance.

With that said i certainly think and andre/will/ricky would have been able to clear it with an on the day effort of 105-110km which would have been hard but doable for them so the setting was probably bang on to be fair :)

MrR, there's no problem setting a control like that - it's simply a matter of participants deciding whether or not they accept the risk in going for it. We'd utterly avoid it at night, but if on a smaller map and if we were competing we'd aim for it in the day - unless there was any other viable route not to get it.

I don't agree with you brycec about the size of the map though - better that the 1 team come in 3 hours early with all of them and you come second and miss a bucketload. :-) But i know I'm in a minority - I like the concept of removing 'luck' from vegetation variability etc by having everyone competitive deal with the same set of circumstances. (Adrian and I won a 12hour, or placed unusually highly once when we went the opposite way around a loop compared to the favoured teams - but they all hit thick shit for 6 hours and were way behind time whereas we had lovely open stuff and were ahead of time. We totally didn't have any inkling about why we went the way we did.).

To paraphrase Tooms - I have no problem with controls like that provided that the map (and/or descriptions) make it clear that it's a shit control. I remember going for one back in the days when I rogained with my parents - the circle was centered on a blank area of the map, without even a significant contour, and the description was "A track junction"...in old logging country. With the nearest decent attack point about 1km away. Hilariously bad control, but at least the map and descriptions made that clear.

yeah but thats just luck of the draw.

Realistically we are talking 10-20 teams of the 100 odd that it impacts.

Personally my thoughts are load the map with as many controls as possible and have them denser closer. What does this do - it means the beginner and less experienced teams get more points and have more fun discovering stuff - it closes the points gap between the top and the bottom. But ti also forces the controls far out to push the top teams to get them if they want the win.

Yes its extra effort setting something unfinishable - but I like that because it become less who is fastest but who has planned their loops and drops the best who can execute contingency the best. Because if its cleanable it becomes more like an orienteering race of who can do this the fastest and the cleanest - and I bet a lot of those courses look very similar.

That said have set once now - I can see the attraction to setting less. Maybe there is a more novel format which suit both and doesn't spank the setting team.

Theoretically you can increase the distance to clear the course simply by loading more controls into the same area. Take that to the extreme case and you can have a semi-infinite number of controls in a relatively small area....and eventually you hit a point where the rogaine area is the same size as your control card.

Hooray, maths!

tldr

thought you had endless time atm ricky :P

Incidentally


We had all the right thinking,
1) Lost bearing to road
2) though where north no south and angle was good
3) decided to go north just didnt go far enough
4) Used fire break correctly just should have stayed on that bearing
5) (not drawn) so close with the last ditch effort if we just went sw 50-100m we would have got it!

All guess without a map but I think it would be pretty darn close to that without my map to hand.

Sorry, not overly interesting reading a blow-by-blow account of each control you went to when I don't have a map!!!

yeah working on that.

A fellow named Ron Oliver (whose area of expertise I have no knowledge of nor do I know where he got his information from) told me, after the event, that the area will be mined for bauxite within the next 5 years. It will go the same way as the horrendous Nanga maps of old.

Makes me a lot sad. I like that area. Four events - one painful epic with Craig Dermer, a win with tRicky and set an event twice there.

I'm not a tree hugger by any stretch but John C marvelled at the diversity and variety of flora.

Whittakers Mill was flooded too wasn't it? (I might have the event name wrong).

What a debacle from brycec (above). It's like they didn't pace count or measure the distance in to the checkpoint or something. Several times. ;-)

haha well tooms - we just never really knew where we where to relocate properly, always stabbing in the dark and the lack of marked "good" trails when less prominent trails where marked certainly played havoc in this area.

I think a lot of the time there was a gut feel I had that we where to the SE of it just didnt know how far north to attack... I really wish on that last attack we had just gone SW a bit because we would have got it but we had wasted soo much time it just didnt seem like a reasonable idea anymore because it would have been all guess work.

That said for strategic guess work we did all the right steps we just never hit our mark.

also if you extend the original bearing line through which I didn't do in the image above - youll find it actually would hit pretty close to where we actually hit the road. so just silly mistakes - just the end bearing on the road made us think we where much further north.

brainfarts for the win.

I think the distance between controls should average about 1-1.2km, a few longer and only a few shorter. Anything much shorter than about 700m can make the legs a bit trivial at times.

MrR - take solace in the fact that we all appreciate your efforts. I would much prefer 100% accurately placed controls over almost any other aspect of a rogaine. A few dodgy bingo controls can be planned around as Tooms says. It can also depend on other things - we hit 76 dead on, no issues at all, so even though we were cautious of the somewhat vague saddle, it was done and dusted in no time.

MrR, appreciate your efforts in setting the event given the workload you'll be under for next year's national champs, even though I didn't attend. Having rogained there in the past I was quite happy to be elsewhere for the weekend but that doesn't mean your efforts go unnoticed!

Big thanks from me too MrR. Not the favourite area to head to from Geraldton, but I knew enough of the backstory to really appreciate your setting efforts.
Also thanks to all involved in rescuing all my school's students from their various misadventures. Two hospitalisations (not rogaine related) and a couple of injuries make for a school camp nobody will forget in a hurry :) The two staff members that headed out on course really enjoyed it too.
Can't say I was impressed to get a phonecall from a kid's mum in a panic at 5:30pm (when I was a good 600km from the event), but, as I confidently predicted to her, the issue was well and truly dealt with by the time she called me anyway

Hit by car?

Ha - not this time, tRicky. The first one was an asthma attack - triggered by someone spraying deodorant on the bus to try to mask the smell of a fart... the first of many misadventures for the weekend. The second involved a lot of vomiting.

Fletch, your students and the accompanying teachers were a credit to their school. They kept me busy. The girl who rolled her ankle and her team did all the right things and were easy enough to find. Even the poor girl vomitting tried to to see the funny side of the whole experience. However, you couldn't pay me enough to take even a well behaved group of students camping or rogaining for a weekend.

It was good when one of your students went up to the older organiser types outside the admin tent and engaged them in conversation - something you'd rarely see a city kid do. For some reason it was only the Gero kids up at 1am!

Tooms - that's because they didn't set their tents up properly and got flooded out! They ended up sleeping in the bus, in the trailer... pretty much anywhere dry they could find.
Ian - thanks. I get to take about half of that mob and an extra 50 or 60 of them down to Perth tomorrow afternoon for an athletics carnival. Not camping though - we have the luxury of a gym floor to sleep on :)