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Balwyn T Party - Monday 2nd October - Report by Mark Besley

When I agreed to organise one of the Monday Night events, I had to consider a few objectives. I was going to be away from Melbourne for most of the two weeks prior to the event, so I didn't have a lot of time available. I didn't have OCad so there wasn't an opportunity to make serious Hashwood-type modifications to the map. Being a Monday event, something novel was called for.

I came up with the idea of making every T-intersection a control. To get an appropriate sort of number of controls, only T-intersections where the stem of the T was the South leg could count. It turned out that there were 50 such intersections on the Balwyn Central map (thanks to BK and John Sheahan for providing this map for the event). There were no control circles on the map, competitors had to identify appropriate T-intersections during the event. You can understand now why I kept the concept secret, as advance notice would have allowed enterprising competitors to pre-plan the optimum route using an old copy of the map. There were still several enterprising people who pulled out street directories before the start and began working out where all the "Ts" were!

I added a "lottery" aspect by making use of a similar concept to that used by the Howes on 31st July - the last digit of the pole number was the point value of the "control" - so essentially competitors visited each T-intersection, located the nearest pole and wrote the last digit of that pole's serial number onto the map. There was of course no way to correlate T-intersections to control numbers on a card, so control cards were not used.

One mistake I made was not making it clear enough that any sort of pole (light, power) could be used, so some competitors went searching for nearby light poles. These competitors were the same ones who didn't hear me call out "don't cross Belmore Road" at the start, and so zig-zagged back and forth across Belmore Road which was certainly not what I had intended.

Initially I had wondered if there would be a suitable pole near each T-intersection as lack of poles would have made the event concept unusable. In fact I had the opposite problem - many T-intersections had two or even three poles adjacent to the intersection! As a last minute rationalisation, I said that I would accept any of these and recommended that competitors check for the highest value one. If a similar concept is used in the future, I believe the instruction about which pole to use needs to be clearer and more specific.

Despite this minor criticism, the feedback to me indicated that everyone had a fun time (or maybe people were just being diplomatic). 25 people turned up including several who had not done a Monday event before. I believe three competitors travelled by tram to the start - a benefit of a map with Whitehorse Road as its southern boundary. The T-intersection concept is a good way to get a big distance on a small map - I made a rough estimate that the distance to get all "Ts" by the optimum route was 12km. No-one got all 50 "Ts" but Bryan Ackerly went very close with 49.

Phil Torode lives within 100 metres of the start so was able to make this his first Monday event. After several offers of help collecting the controls, I retired back to Phil's place for a glass of red or three. We discussed novel ideas that could be used for these events. Unfortunately for Phil there are no Monday night vacancies left this Spring, but I'm sure the concept will continue. Phil is known for his tricky course setting ideas so there's something to look forward to.

Results

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