Team Diary Saturday 21st March 2009
The captain decided that breakfast should be at 7am, so by the time we had finished, there was still 45 minutes until we needed to leave in order to get to the range for the optimistic 9am start. To say that our vans were not designed for off-roading would be rather an understatement. James, having yesterday assured everyone that “he would not be the only one to get stuck”, had to rather eat his words when all the other vans, mindful of the South African’s wisdom of how to avoid the worst of the bog sailed through in some style! Having said that, Willy nearly demolished the gatepost while attempting a daring power slide in order to demonstrate his credentials as a rally driver.
Half the team set off for the butts in a far more suitable truck than ours while the others got ready to shoot at 300m. Contrary to general wisdom that the wind would pick up in the afternoon, the 300m proved the most taxing. However it was made far more difficult as a range by a catalogue of school-boy errors- James setting his rearsight five minutes higher than it should have been which then wasn’t checked by either his coach or the plotter. Furthermore, Bill (having a classic day), once James had fired his shot seemingly unknown to his coach high in the outer, declared “go on”! Andy Wilde who was plotting enquired- “are you sure you don’t want to come down a bit?”, to which Bill replied “No, fine go on!”. James duly fired his second shot, at the same time as Bill said “Stop, someone’s fired on our target!” It was then discovered that Bill had been scoping on the neighbouring target and James’ error was discovered.
Strangely enough, also on the same target, Jon Underwood got down when asked what his elevation was declared “four minutes”, the first shot duly went down the range. A low outer was marked. “Are you sure about your sight setting Jon?” “Well that is what I used in SA last year” came the reply, followed by a pause and then an admission “But I did change my barrel in between!” The parade of calamities culminated in Bill discovering when he put his rifle down on the firing point (as last man down), that the rifle was missing its handstop.
At 600x (so ok, 585x) it became apparent that Bill’s target was hexed for the day. Dave Rose fired his first sighter which struck close to the top of the target. “Could you move my frontsight down five minutes?” So Bill duly moved the foresight one notch down which is indeed five minutes, except in the wrong direction! The second sighter struck above the target and when everyone stopped laughing, Dave scored a 50.4. Jonathan Charles Underwood GM GC SM, was not finished providing his coach with an appropriate degree of challenge. He changed his foresight to a Rightsight and said “my zero is 2 minutes right with this”. Unfortunately, the first sighter was a waterline three o’clock outer at which point Bill asked “are you sure about that zero?” Jon then admitted that it might be the other way around and sure enough the shot plotted out to a 2 left zero.
900x yards was positively tame, the only bit of levity being Dave Rose firing his first sighter on target 3, when he was shooting on 4. All in all it was a good day for England with both our teams beating the Nottingham Rd opposition. The Crowns finished with an average score of 147.16 and the Lions on 144.14 to Nottingham Rd’s 131.7. Top score for Nottingham Road was Willem Botha scoring 146.11 and Nick Tremlett, David Luckman and James Watson all scored 149.17’s with Trem having the best countback score.
After the day’s shooting, we retired to the clubhouse for some beers and Tom, much to his surprise, was presented with… a Cheshire cheese. The said cheese having miraculously not been confiscated by HM customs at Heathrow, despite previous reports in this diary. A number of unrepeatable expletives were uttered in regards to the various team members (little did he know the entire team was in on the conspiracy), who were responsible for this nefarious prank.
Both teams then reconvened at the hotel for an excellent dinner and even better conversation. Various gifts were exchanged and ‘Mug of the day’ hat was awarded naturally to Bill for a day of fabulous exploits!
It was just after midnight when your diarists called it a night having exhausted their creative genius.
