Yet again Darnaway Forest gave us an excellent orienteering venue. Combined with good course planning and a strong reliable organisational team I can only assume that most of you thoroughly enjoyed yourselves on Sunday. I received many positive comments whilst standing at the finish line and at the ice rink car park, nobody seemed to have spotted any of our deliberate mistakes, therefore job well done by everyone.

Well done Mike for providing us with a variety of good challenging courses, his efforts at control tagging in deep snow at the beginning of January were legendary as I'm sure you'll hear for years to come!! However Mike, your expense claim for two pairs of snow shoes and a snow toboggan will not go down well with the club treasurer! You know his tough line on false claiming. Mike and myself have planned/controlled and vice versa together for nearly fifteen years, I'm beginning to think Moravian must reckon the pair of us still need some practice or alternatively nobody else in the club wants to work with us!

Ade did an excellent job organising the event assisted by a small but very dedicated team from the club. Can somebody now tell him he has our permission to turn off the Fabian pre-entry system! Thanks to Ade and the team, the event ran very smoothly, free toilets, free car parking and no rain what more do you want? Also big thanks yet again to Paul Stitson (orienteer - retd) for his diligent support and expertise with the results and the ever continuing emit fault diagnosistics.

Thanks for coming and running
Chris Spencer

Organisers Comments

Well all the hard work paid off… that is the night after night anti-snow dance that I had to do to ensure that we were able to go ahead with the event!

Well this was the first time for Moravian using Fabian4 and I have to say from an Organisers perspective it was an immense help and so easy to do. With our technical issues on the day and running out of maps because the venue proved to be so popular, had we not done pre-registration I am convinced that the registration team would have gone into melt-down. As it was Paul, Margaret and Carole did a terrific job and worked very hard to overcome all of these issues, so a huge thank you from me for all of their efforts… and as for poor Mike and Chris having to get the red pens out almost from the outset!! Well done guys but I think next time we should over order on the maps and accept we will end up with spares!

I really enjoy Organising at Darnaway, it is so easy with everything being on hand and it is certainly one of the best orienteering areas in the North of Scotland. All would of course not be possible without the facilities and permission given by Moray Estates and for that Moravian Orienteers will always be extremely grateful. I should also thank those others that lent a hand on the day by just being available to assist; they took the pressure off us and allowed us the flexibility to sort out the various issues and not have to bring in all the controls as well - so thank you to Roo, Nick, Anne, Eddie, Douglas and Malcolm (my apologies if I have missed anyone, I'll blame exhaustion as I am still tired after a 0530 get up to commute back to London).

I hope you all enjoyed the event as much as we did in providing it for you… I had the added advantage of still getting a run in myself, as did all of the organisation and planning team that wanted to run, so I think it was a success all round. Thank you for your continued support of Moravian events, we look forward to seeing you in a forest near you soon!

Ade Chapman