It was a very pleasant day for orienteering, sunny and temperature in the low 70's. We had quite a good turnout with a total of 63 people showing up and about 24 of those who had never orienteered before.  Five of the newcomers had enough enthusiasm to try the yellow course after doing the white one.

Yaki Barak was the meet director. He designed some very challenging courses. This is not difficult to do at Mingo Creek because so much of the park is covered by fairly thick vegetation. This makes creating off-trail legs in courses quite difficult. Many of the people who did the orange or red course commented on the difficulty, especially on one leg that was partly in common between the two courses. Yellow was also a challenging course, as can be seen from the winning time; however, several people had praise for the yellow course, liking its level of difficulty.

There were two administrative problems at the event.  One was that the finish times did not seem to be right for people on the orange and red courses.  At the event, it was thought that the problem was that the Finish box was not in sync with the controls.  This seemed likely because the Finish box was brand new and the controls had been used many times.  Further analysis the next day revealed that the problem was not that the Finish box had the wrong time; it was that the controls had the wrong time.  The controls had not been synchronized probably since their first use; they were between 20 seconds and 2 minutes fast.  Since the Start box was initialized when the new Finish box was done, it was also not in  sync with the controls which had the wrong time.  The net effect was that the split times (in the tables below) in getting to the first control are one to two minutes too long and the split times in getting from the last control to the finish are one to two minutes too short.  But the overall time for all courses is actually correct.

The second administrative problem was an insufficient number of volunteers during the registration and start period.  One person did not show up for registration on the first shift and two were late for registration on the second shift.  This forced a bunch of shuffling of people and positions to keep everything working.  I urge more of you to respond when Naomi calls for volunteers for future meets.  Even with all the shuffling, every volunteer still got to go out on a course, didn't have to pay a map fee and got to eat some of Sherry's cookies.  Yes, volunteering takes some of your time; but we cannot run our events without the volunteers.

Thanks to Laurie Opila, Tim Spang, Yaki Barak, and Anneliese Steuben for running registration.  Thanks to Sherry Shank and Laurie Opila for doing instruction.  Thanks to Barbara Johnstone and Andy Strat for handling start/finish.  And thanks to Ryan Knecht, Kimmo Berg, Gordon Huang and Alexis Rzewski for picking up the controls.

Our next event will be National Orienteering Day, September 28 at Laurel Hill State Park.

You can see some photos from the Mingo Creek meet here  taken by Alexis Rzewski.

The course results are below.  To see the split times, go to here

Column Explanation: Size is the number of people in the group going as one start. For those with no valid finishing time, "Found" indicates the number of controls they found and "Returned At" is the time they came back to the finish. If the Time shows DSQ, the person missed controls in the middle of the course. If it shows DNF, the person missed controls at the end of the course.