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The 2015 Hairst Rally took place on 25^th October starting in Methlick, about 30 miles North West of Aberdeen. Conditions were near perfect with clear skies, a bright moon and light winds, which was a relief to the organisers as the morning and early afternoon had seen torrential rain and strong winds!

This year I tried  a system which was last used in 1998/9, there was be a number of very short sections followed by a long section (20miles+) through which you will have to navigate from code point to code point. These code points were different to the usual code boards and at each code point the number told you which clue to use for the next portion of the section, all clues were issued at the TC preceding each long section.

The short sections had relatively easy navigation, but being short there is not much time available, the hope being that this would be more enjoyable than the high difficulty clues usually used to get a result, we would do the whole event like this but we would find it hard to get enough marshals.

Rally HQ was at the Scout Centre in Methlick, which is a very nice building with underfloor heating, a fully equipped kitchen and smart toilets. The only problem at the start was that the lettings manager forgot about us and did not show up to let us in until 7:30, 2 hours late! Nevertheless competitor signing on was done out of the back of my pick up, whilst the marshals signed on in the cab at the front!

All was looking good, I had enough marshals to able to put a Judge of Fact out  to police a QZ where we had a PR problem, and all controls were covered with every marshal crew doing two controls. The field was led away by Dave Mackintosh/Duncan Cameron at1931 hrs.

About an hour later I was talking with Graeme Thomson, the scrutineer, and he was asking how the Expert clues worked........in the course of explaining TC1-2 clue I suddenly realised that it was wrong, the map reference to find a codeword needed to decode the clue was incorrect , total panic, it was too late to do anything about it so I just had to wait for the competitors to appear at the finish and prepare for the inevitable flak.

In the end everyone was very forgiving and the event was enjoyed by nearly all the competitors, the exceptions were Harry Merry/ Graham Couser who had a miserable evening, the mistake on TC1-2 really set them back and they became very dispirited, Johnnie Mackay, navigating for his dad was doing very well until part way through the first long section when mal-de-mer set in and they had to abandon – maybe seasickness pills next time!

We supplied soup, sandwiches, cakes and tea and coffee back at the Scout Centre, while we worked out the results, and all was going well until a circuit breaker tripped plunging us into stygian darkness (luckily the emergency lights came on so we could find our way around).Despite the attempts of three professional engineers and an electrician we could not persuade the breaker to re-engage so the end of proceedings was done by the light of head torches, all very cosy!

The results are attached and the competition was quite close but once Duncan Cameron had got over the problems of TC1-2, and a mistake on TC3-4 he and Dave only dropped 3 minutes over the rest of the rally. The error on TC1-2 caused some time to be dropped but on inspection at the end of the day it did not affect the result,