The overall open went quite well, with only the odd problem or two which we were able to solve. It was good to see Paddy Ashe’s son and daughter there to present his cup, and good to see Tim Scannel, a lifelong friend of Paddy’s, being the winner of the cup. It was a bit emotional there for a while, but I think we did him proud regardless. I must have been channelling him for the first card in my pistol match as well :
It’s a pity the whole match didn’t go that way! 😀
The final “group” shows the story rather clearly 🙁
Though to be honest, it felt that the only thing going wrong was that I got tired rather fast. Some decent muscle training might do wonders for that. Anyway, I’m going to get one of the IZH-46Ms. Looked at that for the AP match and it was miles better than the Daisy Matt originally got. Better for starting with than the P40 as well to be honest – you wouldn’t pause too long before hacking chunks off the grip of the IZH, but you’d be looking at that €1000+ invoice for the P40 for a loooong time before you’d get out the hacksaw, and that’ll just hold you back in shooting. Can’t let the gear be more important than the score!
Unfortunately, while the fun of the AP match was grand, the rifle match was… character-building. The score was 555, not what I’d hoped (though not too far off), but the sheer fustration of knowing that your shot plan has the potential to bring in a 580+ if you could just maintain your focus and not deviate from it so obviously, well that’s hard to cope with. Plus, I forgot the thin socks again, so shot barefoot – and competition’s not like training, you can’t really stand still in bare feet on a hard surface while holding a lot of kit for almost two hours. Try it sometime – your feet go numb after the first hour or so, because of the pressure on the pads of the feet, and then you don’t balance so well, and the pain when the feeling returns is enough to have you looking for Amnesty International’s phone number. So lessons learnt, but like all good lessons, painful ones to learn 🙁
Happily, others had a better shoot than me. Several PBs set, several good scores put in, and we did Paddy’s memory proud. I can live with that 🙂
The Paddy Ashe Cup presented.
l to r; Siobhan & Seamus Ashe, myself, Tim Scannell, Geoff Cooney, Matt Fox, Daniel Fleming.