It was a very nice day for orienteering.  It had rained a little the day before and threatened to drip a little at the event; but it never did.  The temperature was in the mid-50's to low 60's, good running weather.  I had been concerned about the parking and so emphasized to the teams before coming that they should carpool if at all possible.  We had a lot of cooperation on that score and the off-site parking approach we used; we actually ended up with about a dozen empty parking places at Rec Hall.  We want to thank all of the competitors for making this work.

We had maxed-out preregistration with 150 people in 80 teams.  Only three teams (4 people) didn't show up (one due to injury) and two existing teams merged.  That left 42 teams on the 3-hour course and 36 teams on the 6-hour course, a nice balance.  We had a lot of teams who had been at Raccoongaine I and/or Raccoongaine II; so, they knew how things worked.  There were a fair number of new teams on the 3-hour course.  This may have accounted for the lateness in finishing by some 3-hour teams.  A total of 10 teams finished late, one an astounding 139 minutes late.  In contrast, every one of the 6-hour teams finished on time.

The format was the same as in previous Raccoongaines.   50 controls were placed in the forest with values of 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 points (10 controls for each value, a total of 1500 points).  Point values were mostly determined by distance from the start and difficulty in getting to them; we did not expect anyone to reach them all.  Four controls (mystery controls) were not marked on the competition map; at four other controls (mother controls) that were marked, we placed maps showing where one mystery control was.  After arriving at a mother control, competitors could choose to go to the mystery control or not; all mystery controls were 20-point controls. The overall winner for the 3-hour was Stratomatic  with 570 points.   The overall winner for the 6-hour was Frog Stompers with 900 points.   The results are available in a spreadsheet-like form at    Results   Use the 3-hr and 6-hr tabs at the bottom to look at the different course results.

An analysis of the control visitations (you can view these at  Visitations ) by the 3-hour teams shows a couple interesting patterns.  All but four of these teams stayed to the west of Route 18.  But of these four, one stands out, the one-person team Windlight:  the only 3-hour team to make it all the way around the lake and consequently the only 3-hour team to visit controls 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 40, 42 and 47.  He did this and arrived back at the finish less than four minutes late, very impressive.  It was only natural that he collapse there, which he did (though not as a medical emergency), see the Monday issue of the Beaver County Times.  Another pattern shown in the visitations is that control 49 was a destination of choice for getting 50 points with more 3-hour teams going there than 6-hour teams.  Not surprisingly, control 1 had the most visitations; but it was surprising that control 15 had only four visits.  And because that was the mother control for mystery control 14, there were even fewer visits to 14.  This was unfortunate as I thought 15 and then 14 were easy to get to.  Two final notes:  1) The reason team Minoxidil has two astersiks in the results is that they lost their punch card; the results reflect the controls they said they visited - since they were not among the award winners, I figured I may as well show it that way.  2)  Two teams had uncorrected mispunches on their control cards; these may have resulted in lost points as they were not counted in the scoring.

An analysis of the control visitations by the 6-hour teams (again see  Visitations ) was revealing.  Every control was  visited by at least two teams; this was to be expected from the 6-hour folks; most of these teams went to some controls east of Route 18.  The most visited control was a tie between 3, 4 and 18 (22 visits each); the least visited was 8; it probably was felt to be a dead end.  There are several one-person teams that are worthy of special note.  Bob Boltz wins the title of Most-Wide-Ranging-Competitor; his path included controls 37, 38, and 42.  A close second was either Cory Linfield whose path included controls 38 and 42 or Frog Stompers whose path included controls 49 and32.  Winning the Clean-Sweep competition was Dan Marincel who went to every control east of Route 18, in addition to visiting nine to the west of Route 18.  One final note:  Two teams had uncorrected mispunches on their control cards; these may have resulted in lost points as they were not counted in the scoring.

Here is a link to images of the routes of several teams that did particularly well:   Winning Routes

Here is a link to Alexis' photos from Raccoongaine:  Photos