Bywell 2022 - Sponsors Day 10/6/2022
Well. That was an interesting day.
The forecast warned us that the wind would be 20mph plus, and it wasn’t lying. My hopes that I might have the best targets of the day came to naught. If they were all over the place yesterday, today wasn’t much better!
Conditions were pretty good an hour before kick-off!
Many shooters were finding them tough to deal with, and a lot of the top ones on the scoreboard remarked at how hard they had had to work to get a good score.
How Paul Chaplow ended up on top with a 100/300 to take High Gun is beyond me, but as that’s what the scoreboard says, all I can say is well shot.
He didn’t have a lot of room. Geoff Howlett and Chris Moule were close behind on 100/298. Chris got all the way to his last round, in sight of the end, before he dropped his two points – so close to forcing a shoot-off for High Gun!
As it was, he and Geoff had to fight it out in a shoot-off to decide overall 2nd and 3rd place. Geoff carried right on from where he left off earlier, absolutely pulverising his targets and any pieces that were left on his way to a perfect 25/75 and 2nd place overall. Unfortunately for Chris, he ended up having a few barrels which meant he had to settle for 3rd overall.
A four way shoot off was needed to decide 1st in AA class.
Dan Price, Ellis Jones, David Caithness, and Mark Shaw all lined up for this decider. Dan and Ellis both shot a perfect 25/75, while David and Mark both dropped points which ended their challenge.
More shooting was needed, and Dan and Ellis lined up again to shoot a round of Single Barrel. This didn’t go Dan’s way, and he ended up with 5 misses to Ellis’ 1, leaving Ellis with the 1st in AA honours.
At the start of the day, I was really hoping to be fighting it out with them, but it wasn’t to be.
I thought I’d got a handle on the targets by the end of yesterday, and if they had been consistent I might well have given the top ones something to think about. But as there really wasn’t any sort of consistency at all, I was finding them very tough to get to grips with, as were many others.
When you’re behind the gun, you don’t always see fully what the target is doing. In the wind today, the next one might be a completely different height to the last one you had, and what you did then didn’t work for this one.
It felt like I was being consistent with my shot preparation and execution, but some of them just weren’t breaking. Nigel Bough had the perfect explanation – “the shot and the target weren’t in the same place!”, or something like that…
My final result was a 92/264, which is definitely not what was required! The last time I shot that sort of score was at the Home International at Fauxdegla in 2021, and the day after I bounced right back with a 99/295 that was second highest out of the whole England Team.
Hmmm...
As precedents go, that’s pretty good, so we’ll go out tomorrow and have a crack at doing something similar! The only snag is that it's supposed to be windier than today...