So, two RO duty stints done this week for DURC (first on the rota, second to cover an RO who got a last-minute glitch in his schedule). Frankly, I’m quite happy – we seem to have a fair crop of good shooters so far this year, including one who put in two nines and a ten in a three-shot string on his first time shooting air rifle without the stand (we use a 3-position stand to take the weight of the air rifle for the first session or two so the new shooters can get used to trigger control and sight picture stuff before going on to do the position proper). That’s pretty darn good. We’re seeing newbies with very decent groups almost every night, and even those with the least success are still good enough that I think we could get them to the 500 mark by the colours, if they just trained once a week. Personally, I’m aiming to have at least one shooter go from scratch now to a 540 by the time the colours comes round in March/April next year.
We are feeling the pinch of low manpower, mind, but we’re coping so far. Also been looking at the budget for the year, and while it’s not extravagant, it looks like we’ll get a few things we could really use this year – new buttplates for the rifles, for a start (the rubber ones they have now are pretty dire for position shooting).
The falling target system seems to be a bit of fun for the new shooters as well, and we’ll use that a bit more in upcoming weeks.
More interestingly, for the first time in a long time, there’s been interest in the colours squad right off the bat. Hopefully, we’ll be able to pick out training squads that are larger than the team again, and actually have some good competition for places on the team. More on this in weeks to come.