Winter Series 2001-2002
Round 1 - 15th October 2001

Now that Foot & Mouth is no longer present in the metropolis of the north, the series for 2001/02 winter started with four teams champing at the bit at the Club HQ start point. Weak but readable signals were heard and all competitors set off in the general right direction... Manchester Airport....well the outer reaches anyway.

Chris Plummer, being a devious kind of soul, had noticed that many of the footpaths south of the airport had been closed or re-routed with the new number 2 runway being built. At the east of the runway tunnels, a new traffic island had been constructed (he suspects, just to spite proper traffic flow as the old road to Style is now closed); anyway Chris had noticed a new set of steps up from the island, a gate and notices of re-routing of a path down to the new tunnel for the River Bollin, under the end of the new runway. So wandering off in camouflage gear and rain cape, with ammo box under arm, he set of to set up near the tunnel. It occurred to Chris that he looked rather suspicious thus attired wandering about near the airport, considering the Sept. 11th. terrorist activity and the increased security around the airport, but no-one questioned him or even saw him setting up, even the walkers and harriers who plodded or dashed past in the October sunshine.

Finding a nice section of older wood, well down near the river, Chris set up his hide, and ran out 300m of wire, mostly along the top of one of the local anti-rabbit fences that now abound there. This had the effect of loading up not only the rabbit fences, but the perimeter fence round the airport, with the attendant confusion factors for close in DFers.

Having had confirmation that he was heard from the start, Chris was quite worried when 11:15 came round and no-one had turned up when the site was only 12km from the start. Then Dave Peacock turned up, ran up and down the paths, questioned a local security man, who said 'he hadn't seen any-one suspicious about and anyway you could do anything you liked outside the airport fence' , so no luck there for Dave.

Eventually, Dave did find the TX crew, after being onsite for over an hour..... followed by Chris Heys, who had got the near professional Polar Explorer Dave Holland to help him, to little avail, Dave walked over Chris's feet, following the aerial... the wrong way. Eventually John Heath arrived, having been on the other side of the river and gone back to his car to drive round, having missed the fact that there was a new foot bridge over the river within 50 yards of Chris's hide. One competitor got confused by the reflections from the M56 motorway crash barriers and went to the pub early, thus leaving Chris out in the rain transmitting and shouting for him to get in.

No-one helped take the wire down, so Chris was drenched by the time he got to the Romper, a mile from the site, and Chris Heys was on his third lunch. Anyway thanks for all for taking the effort to re-start DF's in Manchester after a sad Summer without outings due to F&M etc.