A piece of string is long

Posted on 08 Mar 2014 by WH

Once again, we return to the individual format. Many more competitors had appeared to compete in the Canadian-American Match to shoot strings of two sighters and fifteen to count at 300, 600, 900 and 1000 yards. The stash sweatshirts for the match arrived at the range this morning; you'll see us standing out on Century in the near future from many hundreds of yards because of the luminosity (now tested in the dark too) of the colour!

Once again the weather was clear and sunny. 300 yards showed typically gentle conditions for the time of morning and scores were as high as could be expected. The small bullseye at 600 yards claimed the first victims before dropping back to the end of 'foreplay' zone at 900 yards.

The curious assortment of flags once again took many points off shooters at 900; the gentle flags on the right of the range would often disagree with the more highly-placed sticks to the left. Shooters would often venture out of the X and ten rings by missing the crucial changes. 1000 yards was similar, showing up to almost eight minutes left wind and dying down to around two at times

Some of the team suffered today with poorer scores due to the conditions at long range. However, Ian Shaw powered into third place overall, winning the Master category with a strong 595.22 ex 600 and Euan Maclean triumphed in Expert with a hit of 582.16 ahead of Will Hanley and James Shepherd. More detail may be found on the results page.

After shooting there was a tremendous barbecue, with much of the food laid on by the parents of the California Grizzlies as a fund raiser. Thousands of raffle tickets were bought!

Tomorrow sees the culmination of the championships, shot in pairs at the same distances.