I thought it was not going too well when I could not find my favourite DF trousers and, to make it worse, when I called to pick up my trusty navigator he just looked at me in amazement as if to say "What the hell are you doing here?"

Oh well, seven teams arrived at the start with Mark Coventry on the Tx. Unfortunately, no signal was received at the start, so an approximate bearing of 10 degrees and a distance of more than 20 km was given. Into the cars we went and the first obstacle was a major road closed towards Great Missenden. At the 8pm signal most teams actually heard Mark (albeit weakly), the bearing pointing towards Chesham. After driving through Great Missenden, I heard Mark slightly more strongly, which implied that he could be on the outer edge of the 4km band at Cholesbury. At 8.30 and 8.40 heard nowt, so drove back through Chesham up to Chartridge where I spotted Graham Phillips walking back up the footpath from where the station was situated. But, alas, he had decided that it was too weak and with his comments he and I decided to tackle different directions to find this awkward station. This was my undoing and, alas, had to retire at 9.20 frustrated.

However, Peter Lisle managed to find Mark together with two other teams before close down. The sad part is Bernard Poole was around on site fairly early but, without his lucky team, arrived just out of time.

A good natter and moaning was heard at the local pub afterwards and it appears that Mark had gone to great lengths to make it a hard DF (I agree).

Brian Bristow