Got to say this weekend wrecked me completely, I woke up Friday with another man flu cold and felt like complete shite. This wasn’t helped by getting up at 5.30am to help Shaun with the event, even Phil couldn’t cheer me up. I’ve shot at Blackbrook before so I knew there would be wind (there always is), it’s pretty open down there and the wind is fast and can often move like a window screen wiper across the targets.
The plinker confirmed it, kill and half both left and right plus one straight down the middle, oh joy. The course for the Champs is always tough because well, it’s the Champs. If I was being critical I’d say the course was way too long for the weather, with a combined distance of 90-100+ yards on each lane and all straight in front. This for me makes it a bit dull but at least you don’t have to hunt for the targets! You could have dropped 10yds off loads of the targets and played the angles, it wouldn’t have made it any easier.
Trying to get your eye in was possible but there wasn’t much to read from at all, which made it really hard to gauge. I missed the first one low, it was super cold, so I started adding clicks, the next one was a 25mm, I gave that 20mm and it still whipped it over! Crap, this was going to be a tough one, I missed the next long one by 60mm after giving it a kill and half, perfect height though!
I thought I’d got it sussed when I put a nice string of 8 targets together but that didn’t last very long at all, I couldn’t see anything land because all the targets were absolutely battered. I can tell you that I was shooting into fresh air on a fair few targets that went and I even had one that took me 100mm the opposite way straight into the tree behind, again at the perfect height. I just found it impossible to make the right call, I was pretty solid and didn’t make any schoolboy errors either but everything I did was wrong and got completely punished for it. So frustrating!
I’ve got to take my hat off to anyone who scored 30+ on that course and while you may have got lucky on a couple there’s no way you won on a complete fluke. I managed to come off feeling as if I was bereft of any talent and with the worst score in 5yrs!
