Shoot report – Severn Valley 21st April 2013

Its been a while since my last shoot report due to a trapped nerve in my shoulder preventing me from shooting. So this shoot report is from the view of a marshal rather than competitor, but I hope you will still find it interesting.
Each year SVYF runs 2 shoots one in April and the other in October and last weekend saw us host our first shoot of the year.

Archers arriving on Sunday

We were lucky with weather as it stayed dry all day and nowhere near as blustery as the previous weekend, which had seen numerous branches down.
Saturday saw us, along with other club members, descend on the wood from before 8 am setting up the 3d targets, clearing paths and ensuring directional signs were up. The club house was tidied and kitchen cleaned from top to bottom in readiness for all the cooking that would take place.

Sadly recent weeks have seen the death of the land owner of our wood and the passing of Pete Bates, a well known character in field archery. Rather than having a minutes silence it was decided to have 30 seconds silence followed by 30 seconds of applause in respect of their memories and achievements.

The course is split in two halves with separate course layers setting each side (A+B) which makes for a variety of shots and spreads the work load.

3d target on A Course

The Spring course is made up of 40 targets with a mix of paper and 3ds. This time round it included a few special shots – fan shots and negative shots where if your arrow hit the wrong target you lost 10 points.

B course layers message to archers

With an average of 4 to a peg it gave us about 160+ archers and 20-30 marshals and cooking staff so the wood was pretty busy.
As a marshal your role is to ensure the shoot is running smoothly.

Long bear shot on B course

There was a good mix of traditional archers shooting longbow and American flat bows, along with those shooting compound bows with or without sites. All targets are over unmarked distances so judging the distance is very important and complicated by the use of avenue shots or dead ground.

Shooting group on one of the numerous bridges we have

As a marshal your role is to ensure the shoot is running well. Duties including helping search for lost arrows, replacing paper faces and guiding people out first thing on the walk out.

Another target on B course – with marshals checking view

A friend who was shooting had a pedometer on and he said at the end of the shoot he’d walked 4 miles round the course. If that’s true I must have walked over 10 as I walked the entire course twice and one loop 2-3 times more helping search for arrows etc. Truth be told I was shattered when we finally got home on Sunday night. At least we have 6 months before we have to do it all again.

For those interested full shoot results are available off the club website here. The feedback has been very positive from those attending.
As always thanks for reading.