I was drafted in at two days’ notice to help out non-expert navigator Alan Maxwell, who had placed an entry with Martin Murray. I’m not sure what the problem was, but I was happy to step in as a substitute and team up with Alan.

Organisers were a first-time father and son crew of Nigel and Callum Atkinson. Start was just outside Lauder at Cambridge Smiddy (home of Jock Threadgall), and finish was in the town.

We had a major problem at the start. Alan was doing some map marking and suddenly he realised he had lost one of the maps. We hunted all over the car. Callum came and shouted us to the start control. I told him the problem, and he promised to get a temporary replacement and give it to us at TC4, just before we would need it. To cut a long story short, he had picked up Alan’s map off the table, where Alan had laid it down to sign on. So without realising it, Alan got his own map back.
With about 20 seconds to gather our thoughts, we were off. There were 7 sections in 60 miles.

We couldn’t decipher section 1, so we ended up following a novice. We had a fair idea of the likely route anyway, so it was no great surprise, but the route went via Boon and up the long white that leads to Legerwood. We dropped about 6 minutes by trying to plot it in vain.

Section 4 was a spot height total, and there were a lot of SHs. We tried about ten combinations and finally gave up and went fishing. We were east of Smailholm and the next TC was at Gledswood, so we went along to Brotherstone and turned down towards Clintmains, with Monty and Garry Pearson in tow (all the way from Smailholm, to see the back of a code just after Maidenhall.

Somehow we had stumbled on the route, and the rest of the section was clear. I turned at the next corner and went back via Whitrigghill, Third, Bemersyde and Scott’s View. We got another code, only dropping one in the section. Monty and Garry were behind us all the way.

The last section was a shaggy-dog story, and it turned out that the real clue was at the very end. Eventually, after much head-scratching, I realised there was only one likely route anyway. We dropped another 6 minutes.

Total penalties 52, including two codes, I reckon. Only opposition was Barry and Mark Clough in a Mk2 Escort, on 59. A lucky class win.

Keith Atkinson (other son) and Ewan Leeming won the Open class against Monty/Garry and John Shanks/Harry Merry. I didn’t see the scores.

The Novice class had a clean tie-break between Arthur Weatherly/Colin Smith and Graham Walker/Colin Richardson, which wasn’t resolved by a timed navigational test, so they had to share the honours. There were 7 novice crews in all. It was Colin Smith’s first rally, although he is a past autotester. I knew him in that capacity about 10 years ago. I’ve got to know Colin Richardson quite well too, recently, having exchanged a lot of rally and computer information with him.

12-car events are usually a bit more relaxed than championship ones, and so it proved. But it was enjoyable nonetheless, despite some slippy conditions. On several occasions I was almost caught out by what looked like dry tar that turned out to be much less grippy than it appeared to be. Monty, sitting behind me, witnessed a serious unintended use of the full width of the (luckily) wide yellow between Smailholm and Brotherstone. The narrow yellow from there to Maidenhall was even muddier looking, so I took it very easy there.

 

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