Sunday 11th May - Minor - Novelty - 'A taste of setting'
Update from NPWS: Currently, there is Wild Dog, 1080 baiting underway in the park. Please as part of your event safety brief ask participants to avoid the baiting stations. They can be identified by a yellow or white cattle ear tag in a tree with either a 600mm mound of dirt or disturbed mound nearby. Participants should also avoid touching any dead animals that may be encountered. If a dead wild dog or fox is located it would be really helpful if the position could be noted and reported to Peter Newton in the first instance.
Directions (new parking instructions 5/5/14): Follow the new Hunter Expressway towards Branxton, a trip of about 45 kms and 30 minutes from the Ibis Budget Motel at Wallsend. About 1 km past the end of the new road works, turn right at a sign marked "Lower Belford 3". The assembly area is 200m along this road. Parking is in short supply so park close together anywhere from the highway on. However this narrow road is well used, so for safety reasons and to avoid upsetting the local residents, please only park on the southern side of the road and try and get your vehicle off the tar and onto the grassy verge. Please be careful exiting vehicles and supervise children crossing the road.
Map: Belford National Park (1:10,000 5m contours). This is probably the last time the map can be used in its current form. With the area being handed over from State Forest to National Parks, a cessation of cattle grazing has meant the herb and shrub layer have grown back. So it is a marked change from the previous open running on leaves, particularly on the western side of the road. National Parks have sprayed the African Olive which was proliferate on the eastern side of the map. The thickets are still there as stands of dead trees, so the dark green areas can stay for the time being but will disappear if there is a fire. National Parks have decided which tracks will become their management trails and which will be left to grow over. So the tracks that will stay have been slashed and the ones that will be let go are growing over and will soon need to be removed from the map. Two of the tracks have had to be streamered for this event. With the growth of more vegetation there has been a rapid increase in the number of termite mounds. The termite mounds are not all mapped, so please do not use them for navigation, except in the immediate vicinity of a control.
Setter: Peter Newton
Vetter: Toy Martin
Courses: 5 courses = Very Easy 1.8km, Easy 2.5km, Moderate 3.2km, Hard Short 4.2km, Hard Long 6.7km.
However, as a novelty event not all are standard courses. One of the purposes of a Minor event is to lessen the work load, so no need for the full range of 7 NOY courses. It also enables the setter to change the format, e.g. set a score course, or some training aspect, such as choose the correct control to punch. In areas such as Belford (which are relatively flat with good visibility), often one only needs to be in the general vicinity of the control and spot the bright orange flag ahead, run and punch without ever really noticing the feature that was chosen as the control site. The setter however does not have that luxury, they navigate carefully to what they believe is the site, check surrounding features to ensure they are at the right spot, then tentatively hang a pink streamer. A conscientious setter will approach the site from the direction the competitors will approach, and later approach from a different direction to ensure they end up at the same place.
So some of the courses at this event offer the chance to experience that trepidation that a setter feels, some of the sites may not have a control flag! Perhaps the purists will hate this idea but it is a Minor, 'training' event. The Very Easy course will be a standard course with a control at every decision point and a flag on every stand. To avoid confusing the Very Easy runners, the Easy course shares the same streamered indistinct track. However, Easy course runners may need to skip some of the controls they pass which are not listed in their course description. The Easy course also deviates from the tracks and goes across country, following a distinct watercourse, with a short streamer leg to get them back on the track. For Moderate and Hard courses some of the simpler control sites do not have control flags on the stands. The rules of thumb used to decide if a control flag will be used are as follows: if the setter had to concentrate in order to find the site, or had to check that it was the correct site, then a control flag WILL be used. However, if the setter was able to wander along in a daze and easily arrive at the site by following a line feature, then a flag MAY NOT be used. The idea is that there should be some doubt in the runner's mind as to whether the next control will have a flag, hence the need to concentrate on navigating. To compensate for this slight added difficulty, mainly contour features have been chosen e.g. watercourse head. There are few suitable point features on the map for Hard courses, but leaving the control flag off means a runner has to navigate in order to find the termite mound next to the watercourse. Hopefully this provides more navigation requirement than the previously mentioned running towards a control flag spotted up ahead. Since it is not an NOY event there should be no problems if people have to actually slow down a bit to locate a control site, there is no impact on your NOY score. Remember, there is nothing there when the setter first visits, so competitors should have no trouble finding a bare control stand placed exactly at a watercourse junction.
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