After a couple of weeks of not shooting, and a start that felt a bit rough as a result, I went to North Cornwall Shooting Ground today and managed to finally get my name on a trophy that has been an elusive beast for me for the last few years - the South West Single Barrel Championship.

I had a good crack at winning the 2024 South West DTL Championship at Bradford Shooting Ground yesterday, but it wasn’t to be.

A well shot 98/294 isn’t enough when you have top class shooters from the South West and beyond in form!

This year, the Kellands Cup has been a cracking event with all the drama of a big shoot packaged into a slick, tightly run local weekender.

60 shooters battled it out over 2 days for a chunky prize fund. Class prizes were up for grabs each day, as well as combined prizes and cartridges to go with the smart set of class and High Gun trophies, awarded to the highest 2 day combined scores in each class and overall.

Today, North Cornwall Shooting Ground once again held the Prescott Cup, a memorial trophy inaugurated and first shot for in 2019 in memory of John Prescott.

It's hard to believe that it's coming up to three years since we lost Jethro, and it wasn't until Lanyon (Jethro's son) pointed it out to me that it properly sank in. "Where's that time gone??" I thought.

The last two years of this event have deservedly been the Simon Ede show. In 2022, he gave an absolutely masterful performance that I described at the time as nothing short of a demonstration of how to shoot DTL, and totally dominated the field with a 100/299. A year later in 2023, he showed us all how to do it again by shooting the only 100 straight of the entire day, a 100/296 and winning by a 3 point margin.

You know, there are times when I wonder if some of us DTL shooters are a bit mad. It didn't get above 2 degrees C all day, yet there were still three full squads that turned up at North Cornwall to make some noise and break some targets.

This is a charity shoot held at Bradford SG every year in memory of Matt Gill's father, Dennis (Matt took on Bradford after Dennis died).

This is the 20th year, and before kick-off this morning, almost £19,000 has been raised for different charities over that time.

Today was one of those days where I felt absolutely ready for the contest, but the result just didn't happen. On the plus side, I know why it is and it's something that's easily sorted.

Six squads of shooters turned out to shoot the Bradford Gun Club Championship, and that's not as many as usual. This event is normally one of the most packed on the local shoot calendar, and there were a number of good shooters missing. That said, the entry list included plenty of quality to make it interesting!

About two weeks ago, I was Devon Team Captain at the South West Single Barrel Inter-counties at North Cornwall.

And today, I was leading the county team again for the South West Down the Line Inter-counties at Two Counties Shooting Ground.

Personally, I was quite keen to pay Somerset back for shooting so well and deservedly taking home the Single Barrel trophy, but as always in shooting, you never know what will happen.

There's nothing quite like shooting under clear blue skies and wall to wall sunshine - except when it's hot enough to make you leak from places you forgot you could leak from!

We had 7 squads in total at North Cornwall, and I don't think any of us were really prepared for just how roasting it was going to be - my car thermometer said 25 degrees at 9 am!