This is always a quiet time of the year with the Colour Coded or Badge events being replaced by the fun type events like the WAOC Galoppen which have been running during the summer. It also gives us all plenty of time to reflect on the previous season and to set goals for the year ahead. Whether that be Championship Standard or a Colour Standard, orienteering has the ability to cater for them all.

The new season for WAOC starts with the CATI at Fairlands Valley, Stevenage. This is an event where beginners can experience the joys of orienteering for the first time with help on-hand to guide them. Experienced orienteers can use it as a 'warm up' to the new season. Why not come along, and 'bring a friend' so that they can also enjoy the sport as well.

Neil & Pauline Humphries. ( NeilHumphries@compuserve.com )

The views expressed in Jabberwaoc do not necessarily represent those of the Committee Members or the Editors

It always seems difficult to find much to chat about for the July/August edition of Jabberwaoc. Probably because the number of colour-coded and badge events seem to tail off around this period. I suppose the highlight for me over the last couple of months was the Saunders Mountain Marathon. This year, my running partner, Clive Baker (NOR) and I finished 12th on the Harter Fell course. It was an even tougher test of navigation skills than last year, being inside the cloudbase almost continuously over the two days, with visibility reduced to only 20m or so. In fact, the courses were shortened on the second day due to a worsening forecast. In retrospect, it probably wasn't necessary, but safety has to be uppermost in the organiser's mind, especially as the routes would have taken us over both Great Gable and Scafell Pike, both of which could have become quite dangerous had the weather deteriorated further. As a result, Clive and I finished day 2 in 2:20, a time which is shorter than some of my results from normal orienteering courses!

At the other extreme, the summer Gallopen is well under way with 30 or so people at each event. Other commitments have restricted the number of events I've been able to get to. However I was able to attend most of the Street-O events put on by CUOC on streets and footpaths in and around Cambridge during May. These were very good fun, and attracted a number of WAOC members.

As I write this, it's less than two days away from the Lakeland 5-days - a week long Orienteering competition of 5 badge events on probably the best orienteering terrain in England. I look forward to seeing many of you there, and perhaps I'll have something more to chat about in the next issue.

Enjoy your orienteering.

Dave.

If you are going to the White Rose weekend and would like to enter the relays on the Monday, please contact Lindsey Freeman as soon as possible so that she can make up the teams.

Please do not just ‘turn up’ and expect to be entered in a team!

Lindsey can be contacted by email: Halandlin@aol.com

What is schools league?

The schools league is aimed at pupils from year 5 onwards, but younger pupils may take part. There are six events over a two month period, five being individual events and one a relay. At individual events (the first five), there will be three courses of differing length and technical difficulty, corresponding to Yellow, Orange and Light Green. Pupils would normally run the course appropriate to their year group.

The events are run as a league. A shield, to be held for a year, is awarded to the boy and girl winner of each age group. Medals are awarded to the first three in each age class. A school shield is awarded to the school with the most points. The final event is the relay where teams of three compete on a long or short course according to age and experience.

The events are run by WAOC, SMOC and HH.

The 1998 league has now drawn to a successful conclusion and we can look forward to next year. Unfortunately only one school from the WAOC catchement area has taken part in 1998, it would be nice to improve on this for 1999 and have some medals won by WAOC schools. If any pupils, parents or teachers are interested in taking part in the 1999 league please contact me, some help will be available to get your school going. The dates for the 1999 league are between 22 April and 27 May.

Finally anyone who wants a training run is welcome to come to any of the individual events (full details of all events will be published next year).

Steve Williams

Congratulations to Maria Engberg and Nigel Cole who were recently married - twice - once in Sweden and once in England.

and also to Maureen Weldon and Malcolm Mann who have also recently tied the knot. Everyone in WAOC wishes all four of you much happiness for the future.

On the subject of mapping - WAOC has a few areas that need re-mapping and a new area (Chicksands Wood) to be mapped. If anyone wants to try their hand at mapping, but haven't done any before, get in touch with Fred Northrop. We're trying to set up a 'mentoring' scheme, somewhat similar to having deputy organisers, where you'll have a chance to shadow an experienced WAOC mapper, learning the skills 'on the job'. This can be instead of, or as well as, attending a mapping course.

Thankyou to all those who turned up for the first training event at Ampthill in June and thanks to all those who helped me set up and collect controls at the end. Fortunately the weather held out while most people were there, although I got soaked twice, once when putting controls out and once when collecting them in. I hope you all got something out of it and enjoyed yourselves.

In both the brown-only and map-memory courses, competitors did not know the code on the control and so had to rely on being sure of the feature they were on. Many people made the same mistake on a control in a re-entrant on the brown only course of stopping too short at a control in a nearby re-entrant. Really there should have been no confusion because the two re-entrants were quite different shapes and at different angles. It just goes to show how when you see a control you can get distracted and stop thinking about what you expected to see. I hope to be organising another training event in the next few months so watch this space.

In this section of Jabberwaoc I thought I'd explain some orienteering terms (1 or 2 each issue). The experienced orienteer will already know about these but those of you newer to orienteering may find them useful. When you start orienteering, the biggest problem is lack of familiarity with orienteering maps. I remember early on getting confused between white and orange areas. Green obviously meant trees to me but I often forgot that white also meant forested but more runnable. There really is no other way to train yourself at being better at interpreting the map then by going orienteering as much as possible in different areas and looking at maps after you've run. Different people map areas in slightly different ways. It is always a matter of interpretation. With experience you will get used to what is likely to be mapped and what is not. I still find that causes me problems in areas outside the Sout East.

When you first start orienteering you will be using "handrails" all the time. "Handrails" are line features such as paths, fences or streams. They are excellent navigational aids providing safe routes between controls. You simply follow the feature without having to keep looking at the map or compass. All courses up to and including orange will entirely use handrails although on orange courses the control sites may be just off a line feature. Harder courses will also allow "handrail" navigation for many parts of the course (particularly in the South East where there are many paths) but these "handrails" may be on less obvious line features such as re-entrants or spurs, and taking a safe path route may not be the fastest route to the control.

Julia. (julia@cpd.ntc.nokia.com)

Julia Carpenter and Steve Williams are making arrangements to attend club coach and instructor (respectively) training courses in September/October. Although Julia and Steve are attending the courses to qualify themselves as official club coach and Schools liaison officer, the club is keen to encourage anyone who is interested to attend these courses, we'll also subsidise your expenses. The club coach course is in Hemel Hempstead, and the instructor course is at YMCA Lakeside, Windermere. If you're interested in either of these courses, contact Julia or Steve for more details.

If you're interested, but can't make these particular dates, still get in touch as the courses are put on reasonably frequently, and we can give you details of other dates and locations.

There are also regular courses for planners, organisers, controllers and mappers. Although you don't have to attend a course before taking the plunge and trying one of these jobs (except controlling), many people find the courses very useful. We can provide details of forthcoming courses and the club will also subsidise expenses for these. Most of these courses are only one day long and are put on regionally so won't involve lots of travel.

The Chairman's Challenge turned out to be precisely that: more of a challenge to the Chairman to manage the complicated match-play schedule, than to the competitors who were taking part!

The event was titled 'World Cup Orienteering comes to Harlton' and was based on the 'other World Cup' taking place in France. In essence, the event was simply a knockout score event, with each competitor racing head-to-head against one other competitor in a 10 minute score event. Winners went through to the next round; losers went through to a full 'plate' competition (so everyone got to run in the same number of races). All competitors were given the name of a country to represent, which was used throughout the competition, and there was a real 'World Cup Trophy' to play for. The event used 8 maps, each with 5 or 6 controls on them. I could easily handle 16 or 32 competitors, but the first of the chairman's challenges was handling 18, resulting in a number of 3-way ties.

The order of play looked like this. In each game, the winning player is shown first (where there is a draw on goals scored controls found), the first back player wins). Scores are in brackets. The number to the right of the team name is the map used.

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

USA

6

1

USA

6

5

Argentina

6

6

Columbia

5

2

Japan

3

S. Africa

6

USA

6

Argentina

5

S. Africa

3

2

Argentina

5

6

Columbia

6

4

Spain

6

1

Tunisia

1

Paraguay

5

Spain

6

Brazil

6

Argentina

4

3

Spain

5

7

S. Africa

6

8

S. Africa

5

3

England

1

Holland

4

Paraguay

4

Holland

5

Paraguay

4

4

Columbia

5

8

Holland

4

7

Paraguay

4

2

Croatia

1

Belgium

5

Belgium

5

Belgium

4

Spain

6

5

Japan

4

4

Mexico

6

6

Mexico

6

1

Brazil

4

Brazil

4

Japan

6

Norway

5

Norway

3

Tunisia

4

Holland

3

6

Mexico

5

3

Norway

3

5

Germany

5

3

Mexico

3

Croatia

4

Germany

3

Japan

5

Yugoslavia

4

Columbia

4

7

Norway

4

2

Croatia

4

2

Croatia

5

5

France

4

England

2

Tunisia

3

Yugoslavia

4

Brazil

3

Belgium

4

8

France

5

1

Yugoslavia

6

1

France

6

6

Yugoslavia

4

Germany

5

France

6

Tunisia

5

Belgium

1

England

4

England

4

Congratulations to Argentina and Columbia (Hally and Lindsey) for getting through to the finals of the WAOC World Cup. In the event, both teams declared themselves non-competitive, as they'd surveyed the area, and drawn the map. Also, USA (Mark Collis, CUOC) withdrew at the end of round 3, being unable to field a competitive 'team' as, not expecting to get through to the final rounds of the competition(?), found themselves double-booked and were arbitrarily replaced by Brazil (Mike Gardner). At the end of round 3, I mistakenly promoted Holland, so the 5th/6th and 7th/8th playoffs should have been S.Africa v Belgium and Holland v Paraguay.

All in all, it was agreed that the World Cup trophy (containing a wonderful selection of chocolates) should be divided equally amongst all competitors refreshing themselves at the "Horse and Groom" after the event. Thank you to everyone who took part, and special congratulations to Paraguay, Croatia and France, who fielded very young teams but still held their own in the competition.

Dave.

EAOA AGM

Event levies

The proposal to increase the event levy (unchanged for many years) from September 1998 was agreed unanimously

The proposal to increase the EAOA subscription from £5 to £6 from January 1999 was 10 for and 10 against. The Chairman used his casting vote to defeat the proposal and keep the subscription at £5.

It was proposed that W65 should run Green at EAGAL events instead of Light Green. This will be considered at the next EAOA committee meeting.

Election of Officers

Having served the maximum 3 years as Chairman, Mike Capper has been replaced by Tim Eden (NOR).

WAOC

Event Fees

It was proposed that the event fees for Seniors be raised to £3 and for Juniors to £1.50. The Seniors increase was agreed unanimously with the Juniors carried by 6 votes to 3. It was also agreed to include results free.

The club committee has agreed an increase in entry fees for WAOC's colour-coded events. From September 98, WAOC events will cost £3.00 per Senior and £1.50 per Junior/Student. However, we've also decided that event results will be free - but you'll still have to fill out an envelope, or get them off the web-site.

The decision was taken in the light of increasing land access charges and increased levies from both BOF and EAOA. For those of you who aren't aware, both organisations impose a per-competitor levy on events. In total, this amounts to about 50p per competitor.

Even after the increase, WAOC is still one of the lowest charging clubs in the country, and we hope to remain that way.

If anybody would like to comment on any of these issues or has any other issues that they would like to bring to the committee's attention then please contact us.

As part of WAOC's role in promoting Orienteering, the club committee has agreed to take out a subscription to CompassSport Magazine, to be donated to Cambridge Central Library. The magazine will be displayed in the racks in the reference section, and will include a flier, telling people how to contact us.

If the initiative works, it is hoped to be able to extend it to include the central libraries in Bedford, Stevenage, Huntingdon and Peterborough, although this could turn out to be rather expensive. Hally Hardie is already donating old copies of CompassSport to Huntingdon library. If anyone else would like to donate their copies of CompassSport to a library or to sponsor a subscription (£17.50 p.a.), please feel free to do so, but please let me know otherwise we might start sending copies to libraries which already have them. I can also supply the appropriate fliers to staple to the inside front page.

Fairlands Valley Stevenage TL255238 13 September 1998 CATI (Come And Try It) O signed from A1 Stevenage exits (White to Orange & Green) + String Organiser: Tim Mulcahy

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Wine Tasting Evening 2 November 1998 Hosts: Anne and Peter Duncumb For more details please contact Anne or Peter

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