Happy New Year!  Welcome back for another year of happy shooting.  I hope you haven’t missed the web updates too much … (I know I haven’t!)  As your friendly neighbourhood webmaster has been away for two weeks all of this week’s news comes thanks to Jenni and Andrew.  Enjoy!

Last Saturday’s Shoot by Jenni

Saturday’s shoot was cold but with beautiful sunshine and no biting wind. In Mark’s absence Le Chat was in charge, leading us through the usual ‘warm up’ (I use the term with tongue in cheek ...) and then we had the opportunity to shoot arrows at a BMW tyre balanced on a plastic bucket – just what we’d all been hoping for no doubt! Only Ade managed to get any arrows to stick into the tyre although there were plenty of rebounds when we shot at the tyre side on instead of trying to shoot inside it, but the bucket won’t be seeing any future use as anything except a very dodgy colander. As there was an even split of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ a battle of the sexes game of colours was next. Through gritted teeth I have to report that the boys won, although it went down to the wire.

Then we had what has now been announced as the last 2 qualifying games for this round of the Companions Trophy. First up were 3 rounds of target shooting using Olympic scoring (1 through to 10). The results are as shown:

Then, making the most of a rare wind-less day, we had 4 rounds of clout shooting, with points awarded based on the archer’s nearest arrow in relation to everyone else’s nearest arrow. The final results are based on the average position over the 4 rounds:

For some reason (Le Chat forgot?!) there was no nearest-the-bull shoot-off to decide the 2 bonus points but as both of the day’s winners (Dave & Lewis) have qualified for the Trophy final anyway at least the additional points would have been academic.

So we now have 11 archers who will be shooting it out in the Trophy Final which will be held in a few week’s time (probably February) – congratulations to: Dave, Mark, Richard, Ade, Andy TB, Martin, Jenni G, Lewis, Anna, Ian & Kirin. The full final league table can be seen in the Members Area.

Plantagenet Charity Shoot by Jenni

The following day a few hardy/idiotic Companions (Dave, Helen TB, Anna, Nigel, Lewis, Kirin, Andy S and myself) went to uphold the club’s honour at the Plantagenets’ annual charity archery competition at Norton near Gloucester. Given the temperatures and ground conditions (below freezing and rock hard respectively) I think we can congratulate ourselves just for turning up, but in addition Helen TB deserves a round of applause for winning the Ladies trophy! If you’re feeling generous, you might give Andy S & myself a small clap for coming second in the Mens & Ladies respectively. The Men’s Trophy was won by Alex Bannister, a reprobate known to some of you and nearly an honourary Companion (hopefully an official one soon, eh Bob & Jane?!), in his first year shooting as a Senior. We have of course promised to return next year to continue our good record.

Archery Room 101 by Jenni

Next week is the return of the Room 101 shoot, where you bring along something that you want to consign to the archery room 101, and if the rest of the archers agree with your reasoning, it gets the crap shot out of it – great fun! Anything is fair game, bearing in mind safety considerations – the last time we did this in October 2007 the items included a Christmas novelty mug, ironing, warfarin tablets, a musical instrument and an actual computer! So please be imaginative and we look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible.

Companions Trophy by Andrew

[There have been three weeks worth of Companions Trophy scores that have now been updated in the Members Area.  This is last week’s Trophy scores—Mark]

The game results for this weekend is as follows:

 1st game: Olympic Scoring – Totals after 3 rounds