Okay, so not in the match itself, that went rather well and I’m quite happy with the scores our squad put in, but a connecting rod in my Izzy has broken! No!
Well, it doesn’t look that serious. I’ll bet it would just be a short bit of work to fix, if I could find the time.
In other news, the new procedures for handling challanges and returning targets worked fairly well. We tried both a single waiver sheet to sign for your targets and individual waivers per person, but the single sheet proved more managable on the day. I think we should go with that in future.
I’m growing more convinced though, that we need three people in the range to run a match right. One supervising the range, one supervising the stats office and one looking after equipment control. That last bit will start to take more and more time as we bring in more and more equipment control checks beyond the current pistol trigger weight check and the upcoming pistol box for checking dimensions. Things like rifle weight, rifle dimensions, and then on to clothing checks, that’s where we want to go until we have national competition standards that are at least a match for major Bisley competitions. And of course, all this means training, so yes, we will put together a training course for match operations/statistics office operations (that might be one course or two, we’re not sure yet). More details as they’re available, and it’ll go up on the NTSA site as soon as we have something as well.
As to the DURC Squad, I’m quite happy with their scores overall. Gear got left behind on the Sunday, that probably cost people anything up to twenty points apiece, if not more. That won’t happen for the colours. And some made silly mistakes that we can fix before the colours, so that doesn’t worry me either. All they have to do at this point really, is to keep calm and shoot the match like it was just mowing the lawn.
We also had one of the fullbore bretheren come down to the match and shoot with air pistol to see what ISSF is like – he enjoyed it quite a bit, found it had more challange than it’s given credit for, and he’s returned the favour by inviting some of UCD’s air pistol shooters to go fullbore shooting later on. So that might be the start of something good, who knows?