General news
Target Shooting Results
UKAF is the new title of what used to be known as the Combined Services. This match is usually the third CSSC representative match of the Target Rifle season and is always the toughest match.
This is because of the quality of the opposition, as they have the choice of all serving members of all the armed forces who are generally much younger and with better eyesight than the CSSC team members. A number of our team were OAPs.
As mentioned in the report of the Service Teams Match, this year has been very difficult to arrange targets, made more difficult in this case because the UKAF Captain was posted to Mali for the early part of the year and without communication.
The result was that we could not shoot at long range at all. The course of fire was 300 & 600 yds on conventional targets in the morning and 300 & 600 yds in the afternoon but on electronic targets using an ICFRA target at 300 but an NRA target at 600.
One saving grace was that using the electronic targets gave us the opportunity to experiment how they could be used for team shooting, something we had not tried before but may become more usual in future.
The match is usually based on the best 10 scores from a team of 12 shooters but on this occasion, because the match details were not confirmed until the last minute, some shooters from both teams had arranged to do other things and were not available to shoot. Consequently, both teams only had 7 shooters and it was agreed to count all 7.
The day started warm with a light fishtailing wind towards the shooters. At 300 yds the team dropped 15 points which was an average of almost 48. At 600yds the team dropped 12 points, an average of just over 48.
In the afternoon the score at 300 yds was 17 off, slightly lower than the morning but the ICFRA target is harder than the NRA target. At 600 yds the team dropped 29 points, this reflecting that difficulty of wind coaching as the wind became more fickle.
The wind coaching was by Ian Davison, Rob Lygoe, Alastair Haley and Roger Quy.
