(pictures courtesy of N. Hightower)
Rallymaster (and NWRC President) John Humphrey writes:
First, I would like to thank Mike Daily, our NWRC Vice President for all his help in measuring, pace assistance, scoring, and trophy making. Secondly, the world is an imperfect place, which brings us to rally night. I had a premonition the night before that there would be a ‘road closed’ on the rally. I attribute this to my Native American ancestry. I was so taken by this thought that I wanted to drive the course on Friday before the event but didn’t have the time due to other priorities. And, finding an impaled dead bat (most likely collected during our rally checkout) in the grille of my X3 at rally registration was confirmation of an imperfect night ahead.
My premonition was right as there was an emergency road closure for a bridge repair on SE 156th ST which was announced late Thursday 9/7 and effective Friday 8AM 9/8!! The Leg 1 Checkpoint was on that road. This forced us to throw Leg 1. Mike, on the fly, figured out how we could potentially save Leg 2, but several cars were already beyond the selected restart point. Hence, Leg 2 was thrown also!!
We did send out Broadcast Messages however at the end found out, that due to the differences in Android/iPhone functionality/behavior and the issue of gaps in cellular coverage for the variety of open vs. wooded vs. commercial areas we drove through, not everyone received the messages in a timely manner or at all.
I hope you were able to view all the wildlife that SE King County has to offer – a small posse of Elk (12?) between NRI 35 and 36 (258 AVE SE); a jogging coyote after NRI 56; and ‘observing raccoons’ watching us near NRI 69 and NRI 72!! Fortunately, the suicidal deer encountered on checkout just after NRI 56 were no shows!!
Anyway, despite the turn of bad luck for Legs 1 and 2, I hope you enjoyed the balance of the rally.
Greg Hightower is the Rally Master for October and I know he will have an entertaining rally for all of us!!
Again, thank you all for attending and understanding that life happens.
JRH III
Mike Daily says
For anyone who needs more details about the road closure hiccup.
The pace crew’s response to discovering the emergency road closure was appropriate and made perhaps ten minutes before teams would begin to reach that point. We, meaning John (rallymaster, driving), Derris (navigating), and I (monitoring event status from the backseat) pulled over and discussed the ramifications. A reroute was devised, which replaced one route instruction, deleted the next, and changed the one after. A succinct Broadcast Message to competitors was drafted and sent to the cloud. It was immediately picked up and displayed by our own device running the Competitor app. With the route and instructions stitched back together, we could move on to deal with trying to minimize the impact it would have on scoring.
The closed road contained a checkpoint. Its loss would trash legs 1 and 2 of the rally. I devised a plan to try saving leg 2. We could move this checkpoint ahead along the route to an undisturbed NRI. It was ambitious and, in this circumstance, not going to work without one more instruction in the Broadcast Message.
As John said, unknown to us, some teams did not receive the Broadcast Message(s). This feature had always worked in the tests I’ve run, albeit that testing was only done with Android devices. Data has been sent to the app development team along with many questions. So, while I’m sorry that there was an issue, please understand we thought our solution was working. Our Android device with Competitor was getting the Broadcast Messages right away. We had no reason to consider an alternate solution and still had five more legs to check as pace.
Three instructions later, John spots the first elk of many. A small herd is crossing the road. The Broadcast Message was amended to include a warning. From the backseat I was monitoring cars via the Map view in Richta Rallymaster. Cars were moving along the re-route around the closed road.
There were two teams in the novice class that were struggling from the very beginning and I was trying to assist them with a series of text messages when possible. You missed NRI xx, turn around. Map view can help sweep the course. I learned later that one car had wrestled with our strange acronyms, as they were unaware of the existence of the Generals and Supps. Let’s give them credit for making it to the finish to learn more. The other team texted to say they were calling it a night and going home.
Initial scores for checkpoint 6 were all maxes. A quick look at the spreadsheet showed the leg was over 14 miles long and had an official time of about as many minutes. Yeah, that’s a problem. We found the bad cell in the spreadsheet, updated the leg time in the cloud and exported the updated scores. Was getting a little bleary-eyed by then. It had been a hectic night.