Safari Scatter

27th/28th March 1999

Results

Winners:	Steve Cole & Bob Blows	680 points
1st Exp:	Les Parsons & Stefan Arndt	508 points
1st Semi:	Andy Watson & Alan Whiteley	496 points
1st Novice:	Peter Wheatley & Steve Azzopardi	448 points

Well that's the Safari out of the way for another year. I hope you all enjoyed the event and found some fun roads to drive along, and that you'll all come back next year for another go. This year's event was yet another change of format for the Safari, partially returning to its original format of A boards leading to B boards, but expanded by the use of two extra levels, and at the same time simplified with the use of a vast number of easy points available from the word 'go.' The idea of this was to give everyone plenty to do throughout the evening, with a minimum of sitting around wasting time. I realise there may have been an element of going back over where you'd recently been, which has attracted criticism in the past, but I feel the true art of doing scatters is in the ability to modify your route plan as you go along. This always has been, and always will be, an essential part of the Safari Scatter.

At the lower end of the points scale, of course, where three A boards led to each B board, there was unavoidably a bias in terms of ease of route for one of the As in favour of the other two, but I did try to even things out to some extent with regard to that. You'll have to be the judges of how well that was or was not achieved. Feedback from such an event is always useful, and next year will probably be fairly similar, so if you'd like more of the same, then please come back. Having read the results and compared how well you did and where you went with those above you in the results list, I'm sure most of you will be eager to improve your own strategies, and get one over the opposition, next time. I know I always come back from these events thinking If Only I'd had another 5 minutes, or not ignored that particular route check three hours ago, or whatever.

Returning to this year's event, a look at the results sheet shows that virtually all 60 codeboards were visited and found, with the exception of D4 (Bob, Stefan and Dave, did you fail to plot this or just not have time to get to it?), and A30, which did go missing. Any crew who visited this and wrote or told us that they could not find it were awarded the points for it. Unfortunately we can do nothing about the fact that they would have needed to visit A28 or A29 instead, in order to get the location of B10, but it would appear that A29 was on a good route for most people, as it was found by 13 out of 16 crews.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the other people who contributed to the successful running of this year's event:

• Andy Juniper, for much help with the preparation of the paperwork (regs, finals, cluesheets etc)
• Dean Taylor, who came to assist with final preparations and running the event on the night
• Trevor Joel, for initial documentation, checking clues, and assistance on the night
• Stuart Prismall, for driving me around to put out the codeboards, and marshalling
• Fiona Casey, Andy Watson, and Alan Whiteley, who between them organised the production of the cake at the finish
• Tony Reynolds, RLO, who permitted the event to be crammed onto a well-used map.

That's all for now, until Safari 2000,
Doug

B board locations

C clues and missing info

D clues and missing info