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It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

Winston Churchill


Section G: Quibbles

G-1 Controls for Other Races

Controls not on this week’s list are not there for the purposes of this race.

There are over a thousand controls out there. The next race’s controls are already there. Captains may want to make note of them, but they don’t count.

G-2 Don’t Mess with the Controls!

You may not remove, hide, deface, obstruct, or otherwise do anything that would make the control harder for following teams to find than it was for you. You may not put up decoy controls to distract following teams from the real control.

Only the course maker is allowed to set up decoys. That way they are the same for every one.

G-3 Missing Controls

In the event of a control not being found, even though both captain and leader agree that it should be there, it counts as zero – not found. In the event of a control being found, but the label being unreadable, the leader will record the specifics of the control. (Location, color, type of tree, bearing off any nearby unique objects such as fence corners. The team will be initially scored as having found the control.

Controls vanish. They get pecked by woodpeckers, nibbled by moose, chewed by squirrels, fried by sun, removed by farmers, torn off by wind. Trees fall over, Streams flood, fence posts rot, old sheds collapse. There is no way to tell between a control that is gone, and a team that can’t navigate.
The course setter for the race will verify the existence of unlabeled controls, and will either approve or retract the team’s score for it.

In running this program, I tried to place controls where they would be usable for at least 5 years. Obviously with snow on the ground, it wasn't possible to check the controls just before a race without leaving tracks.