Report by Steven Scott, Member of Forth Valley Orienteers

Forth Valley Orienteers was the second club in Great Britain (Grampian Orienteers beat us by 30 minutes with their event at Hazlehead) to be able to offer "proper" orienteering in the lockdown phase. Under normal circumstances, we would be having one or two events a week right through the year, but Covid restrictions meant that we had a hiatus from mid-March, with no events taking place. We'd also never had an event in August before, as the vegetation in most of our good areas is too thick to allow a decent standard of courses, so it was a challenge to find areas that we could use and were usable.

Our Permissions Officer, Sarah, worked her socks off through July to get in touch with all our landowners, and find out what their reaction would be to us having an event. Many were understandable reticent to allow us onto their land, but a letter from SportScotland to the effect that they endorsed our activities, provided we had safety measures in place, went a long way to alleviating these concerns. We are also fortunate in Scotland to have the Land Reform Act, which establishes a legal right to be on land, provided this is done in a responsible manner.

We have had two events now under the "Back to the Forest" scheme, and a third will follow on this coming Sunday (23 August). We used online entry using an app written by one of our young members, with people choosing start times when entering. There was scope for anyone who had been shielding to request a start time well away from anyone else, although no-one took us up on this. A printed start list was at the event, and we ticked people off when they left and returned, for safety purposes.

We had 2 officials manning the event, the planner/organiser, and one of our experienced controllers as safety/covid officer. They did everything, including control collecting, and this avoided anyone else touching any of the event equipment. Handling maps and getting them out of boxes is one area where multiple people are touching, and the organiser put one map under each box as soon as one was picked up, so only the organiser and competitor were touching each map. The organiser sanitised his hands regularly to prevent cross-infection. Although SIAir was enabled, the start and finish units have manual punching, rather than air, so these were cleaned with the sanitiser when they were brought in, as were the clear and check units.