SVYF is our club and this means this shoot report will be from the view of the organisers rather than competitors. You can read some earlier reports here Autumn 2014, Spring 2014.

Helping to run a shoot is a lot more tiring than shooting and it gives you a great insight into the work involved in setting courses.

The course this time comprised of 40 targets mostly 3Ds with a few paper faces. I’ve loaded some pictures on my Tumblr site (http://offthearrowshelf.tumblr.com/) already but here are a few more. Sorry there aren’t any action shots was a bit busy.

We delayed the start from 10 due to an accident on the motorway that delayed many archers’ arrival. As it was we only had 3 no shows, resulting in over 180 archers attending. It was great to catch up with so many fellow archers, friends and a few readers of this blog. It is always great to meet up with readers of this site so please if you do see us a t a shoot pop over and say hi. (Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery for the shoulder)

The wood surrounds a couple of over grown ponds and is quite sheltered except on one side where the edge of the wood is exposed to open fields. Archers on this side would be battered by exceedingly strong winds, making the archery challenging to say the least. I think the compound archers suffered the most as their arrows were flicked off their rests.

Besides the high winds the only other problem which was partly under our control was the running repairs on bridges.

In SVYF we have over 13 bridges ranging from only a few feet in length to over 100 feet. We run regular checks on the bridges, replacing planks etc, but with over 180 archers trekking across them, plus organisers we had a few planks break. The only problem was they seemed to all go on one bridge, we had seven go on one bridge in the space of 20 minutes. Added to this was that target was 40 shot was across the bridge so we had our work cut out for us, cutting new planks, removing old ones and replacing them.

Overall the day seemed to run well, with archers enjoying themselves. Sadly not everyones day went as well due to delays on the course, we finally traced these delays to one group that were being very slow in shooting and scoring.

SVYF next shoot is in early October, hopefully it won’t be so windy.

Thanks for reading