This year’s treble night trialled an early start time of 4.20pm and a new title of ‘treble twilight’ with the aim of encouraging more distant teams to participate. There was a very positive response with 9 competitors on the night, up from 4-6 in recent years. From the start at Maidenhead Thicket good signals were heard from Transmitters A and C, but B was reported to be heard by only one contestant (later found to have actually mistaken this for Tx C). It transpired that Tx B, manned by Steve Stone and situated on Wildmoor Heath just south of Crowthorne, was only radiating approximately 2km due to a broken feed wire to the main antennae.

Most competitors chose one of the audible Tx’s first. Bill Pechey headed for Henley where Min Standen on Tx A was hidden in dense holly in a piece of woodland to the West of Henley somewhat quaintly named ‘Fairies Hole’, and was first to find Min at 5.45pm. He was followed about ten minutes later by Colin and Rosie Merry, Graham Phillips, and Tim Parker. Alan Simmons meanwhile had correctly pinpointed Tx C on a piece of disused railway land to the north of Bourne End, and successfully located John Mullins who, although seated comfortably in the open, could only be accessed by literally crawling up a 20 metre tunnel of undergrowth from a footpath into an open area which had impenetrable brambles and insurmountable fences on every side.

At around this stage, with teams starting to succeed in finding Tx A and Tx C but no-one successfully finding B, the organiser decided to text all the competitors and advise them to aim for the Crowthorne area for TxB. Unfortunately some did spot this text coming in which skewed the results of the competition. Nevertheless some good DF-ing was enjoyed around Min and John’s sites and four competitors succeeded in finding all three Tx’s with Bill Pechey leading the way to a ‘career first’ win of the Eric Mollart memorial trophy.

At a good-humoured supper afterwards there was general consensus that the earlier start time should be repeated in 2014 and that the Mid Thames treble should continue to be held on the date that the clocks change at the end of British Summer Time.

Peter Lisle