Competition report (Salisbury, May 19th 2002)

The kids had only been up for an hour or so by the time that Mike & Dave arrived to pick me up, at 07:45 on Sunday morning. We had arranged that we would meet up with Roy & Christine in Salisbury, where they were "camping" overnight. Dave had brought so much stuff that I just barely squeezed my Bow case & holdall into the boot of Mike's car. Then off we went to Salisbury, discussing our aspirations for GMB level scores (at least) in the coming FITA.

We arrived in plenty of time & go to work setting up tents & bows. At least I did. Longbow shooters don't have to do much setting up for their bows & with Mike opting for a chair alone & Dave for a chair & a big umbrella I think that most of the setting up was done by me! There then followed a pleasant 3/4 of an hour of meeting archery friends &  acquaintances & catching up on "news" before the whistle blew for assembly.

After the basic introductions to the rules of the shoot we retired to our places to prepare for the sighters end. At this point I discovered an important learning point - the field at Salisbury is not set out as square to the back of the field as I had thought! I had put up my tent behind the shooting point for target 1 & I was shooting on target 5! Ah, well! I didn't do too much sitting down to begin with.

I was shooting with 2 people I had not met before: Alan & Andy. They were both very helpful throughout the day, making sure that my lack of familiarity with the rules & etiquette of competition shooting didn't cause me any embarrasment & teaching me a thing or two about sight marks & even the more arcane functions of the TargetPlot archery software on my palmtop computer! Alan's tripod mounted telescope was far more use than my binoculars for the further distances, although even with that I couldn't distinguish between Andy's curly Vanes & mine.

Despite a rather dodgy set of sight marks I was doing reasonably (for me) at the 90m & 70m distances. Which brought us up to the change over for 50m & lunch time. The Osprey party retired to the mobile Hodder residence for lunch & a quick chat before returning to the remaining 72 arrows. By this time I was beginning to feel the strain of all that shooting, but at least pleasantly surprised that the aching muscles were the ones that are supposed to get used. The 50m 3 dozen were not quite as much of an improvement on my 70m score as I had hoped, but despite the growing fatigue I managed to pull my score up considerably at 30m, even if it took 3 or 4 draws to get the arrow through the clicker. Here Roy gave me some good advice & after a 1/2 inch reduction in my draw length & a compensatory sight adjustment I was much happier & no less accurate. I finished with a sigh of relief & a huge smile, having beaten my personal best from my University archery days.

The prize giving & raffle gave us chance to catch up with each other's performances & to note the effect of being out in the open all day - red faces all round. I must remember a hat next time! We did well in the longbow & ladies recurve, but all of us had a good time. I was certainly ready for bed that night, but I'm already looking forward to the next competition & I'm thinking about entering for more than I had initially planned to.