2007 January Jaunt Results

• Event Report
• Overall Results
• Detailed Results

Event Report

The conditions at this year's January Jaunt were more spring-like than wintery. But the winter navex tradition lived on, with a level of difficulty to interest and challenge navigators, and muddy conditions on interesting roads to challenge drivers at the same time.

With 22 entrants, the Jaunt continues to be one of the best attended navigational rallies in Ontario. But what is really notable is the high number of Novice class entries, at 17 this year! (In comparison, there were 15 Novices last year, and 13 the year before.) It's interesting to note that almost half of the entrants did not identify themselves as belonging to clubs. On top of this, with a number of familiar Jaunt faces, the Beginner's school was the most lightly attended of the past three years.

I think the big story for this event is the successful use of Time Allowances. TAs allow competitors to effectively insert a pause into their timing when something goes wrong. They emphasize the fact that this rally was designed to provide a challenge with navigation and precision timing, and also helped ensure that competitors would not want to exceed the speed limit, even when things went terribly wrong. When examining the results, it's obvious that competitors did not zero controls because TAs were available - in a lot of cases, there was increased challenge for zeroing controls, with competitors asking for TAs that were both too large and also too small.

I heard from entrants that TAs were used for multiple purposes: at least one competitor was delayed by a train at a level crossing, another had a carsick navigator, and others had some type of navigational error. But competitors still missed controls, and still had difficulty arriving at controls (some quite well-hidden) within the correct window for a low score.

It's interesting to note that the overall winners of the rally, Bryn and Terry Epp, won the Expert class with a score of 3.7, and without using time allowances. The Intermediate class was running the same instructions (I called them "Hard"), so the results are comparable. The 3 Intermediates where challenged a little more than the 2 Experts, with Roger Sanderson and Christina Chinn winning with 12.5 points, edging out Ed and Jeff Richardson by a single point.

The Novice instructions were called "Easy" again this year (in contrast to the "Hard" instructions), but the Novices were still challenged. All Novices finished, so I'm going to go ahead and say the level of difficulty was appropriate for challenging the "senior" Novices, while providing an... er... "opportunity to learn something new" for the newer Novices. Nikola Novak and Fiel Cotta won the class with 4.2 points, while Tim and Murray Dammeier came in second at 5.1 points, only 0.3 points ahead of third place Tim and Steven Laye.

As was the case for the past two years, we made efforts to ensure we didn't leave any competitor behind when they got lost. We tracked cell phone numbers of competitors again (with the intention of calling in case they got lost), and made extensive use of HAM radios to track rally progress and coordinate course open, course close and checkpoint activity.

Once again, I owe a lot of credit for the success of this event to the people who helped work the event. The checkpoint volunteers gave up a good portion of their Saturday to work at this event, and the greencrew gave up more of their time. Along with my co-organizer, Dietmar, and Robert Roaldi, the ORRC Guru who reviewed the event, here are the people who helped with the event this year:

Thanks once again to all competitors and workers who helped make the event a success. We once again enjoyed a great turnout at this event, and managed to avoid any real issues this year, (with thanks, at least in part, to the use of TAs). I hope to see all of you around at the next ORRC navex!

Kurt Seelenmayer VA3KSE
Organizer, 2007 January Jaunt

Overall Results

Detailed Results