Arnold wrote:I guess ultimately no outcome is satisfactory and at least there was no tangible advantage gained by not punching control 149. On the other hand, it does set a somewhat concerning precedent of "it's ok not to check your control codes as long as you're roughly in the right area"...
Actually its possible to mispunch even if you do check your codes....
At the British Championships a few years ago I saw a control (a crag in a re-entrant) from about 100m away just where I expected it to be, checked the number as I approached and was surprised to see it was wrong. I checked the map and descriptions again it looked OK – I then looked up at the flag and this time ‘saw’ the correct number at least I thought I had. I punched the control and ran off still feeling uneasy about what had happened and checking that I hadn’t missed a control or something. When I got to the finish sure enough I’d punched the wrong control. Not sure what happened – possibly some sort of confirmation bias – I was so sure it was the right place that I convinced myself I’d seen the code.
I checked with the planner who showed me the control I’d punched. It was about 60m away in an adjacent re-entrant which started slightly lower and was less obvious. My attack point was about 250m away, so reasonable to confuse the two features, and since I saw the control on what looked like the right feature I started to check my route to the next leg rather than looking at any other detail.
My control was a crag in a re-entrant the other was a re-entrant with a crag in it (with the control positioned alongside the crag). Apparently they looked very different on the ground, but of course I’d only seen the wrong control, and to me it seemed to fit the map and description and expected location given my direction of travel. The planner and controller agreed, in hindsight, that they should have had just one control – I think they had courses coming in opposite directions so didn’t want to combine the control. They also agreed that 'similar features' didn’t require the features to look similar on the ground or have the same control description – it was how they might be interpreted from the map that was important. At least that's how I remember the conversation!