New archery range in WTSC

One little bit of news from WTSC is that we’ve been given permission to use a neighbouring field to our own for outdoor archery practise. Our current setup can cope with a few people at up to about 30m:

It’s perfect for training and tuning and for beginners shooting, though perhaps it is time we did a bit of renovation on the backstop netting…

The new field has a lot more potential in terms of distance; we’re pretty sure we can run a full FITA round in it (30m, 50m, 60/70m, 70/90m for women/men). It does, however, need a little work before it’s ready…

Pretty awful photos – cameraphones do have limits 🙁

Basicly, we need to cut a gate out of our current field into this one (in the bottom photo, that gate will be just hidden behind the foreground trees on the far right); then do some work cutting down the large tracts of weeds and then cut the grass a lot shorter; then level up the firing line, do something about drainage, measure out and mark off target lines for 30m, 50m, 70m and 90m, and do a safety check to ensure noone can easily walk into the middle of the range while we have a bunch of people firing sharp sticks at 200kph downrange!

We’ll probably have to invest a bit in some new kit as well – new target bosses and frames, a dolly for carrying them (carrying by hand to 30m is okay, but beyond that it’s silly), a metal detector for lost arrows (that ground’s a bit soft, arrows could bury themselves) and possibly a new shed to keep all the bits in or something like that.

So it’s good news, but expect calls for work parties at some point as well as fund-raising drives…