On Sunday 25th August 2024 we held our annual Summer Club Championships.
Gallery at the bottom of the page
WRITE-UP BY OUR CLUB CHAIRMAN KIT
(shamelessly stolen from his Facebook post)
What a day.
Ok, so it was Outdoor Club Champs today for the Bowmen Of Harrow, and what a turnout! We combine the outdoor champs with our Summer BBQ, so we had 30+ archers and 60+ BBQers lol. This year we included 3 distances to accommodate as many archers of different abilities as possible. We had a Short Metric IV (20m/10m) for our Junior Novices, Long Metric V (30m/20m) for our adult novices and Long Metric III (50m/40m) for the rest of us.
The weather was also thankfully, pretty decent. The champs were originally supposed to be on yesterday, but we had to move it to the 25th ages ago. Lucky we did as it rained ALL day yesterday, but today? Pretty good sun (yay!), but it was windy. And the wind made things… interesting. It was so windy shoes were flying off, mass hysteria!
Seriously though the wind was strong, and changed direction multiple times mid end. I shot today with John Mooney and a couple others, and funnily enough seemed to affect all of us. So on one end we might have all trended to the left. And on another all to the right. Some ends we might have been bob on ie on one end almost all of us got an X (Bar one who got a 10)! But yeah, look at picture 5, our arrows are going in at crazy angles…
But yeah, we were all (as a club) doing pretty well, Pic 7 was from one of the Long Metric V’s, novices all! The gold arrows with white/blue vanes was Barebow with club equipment (on her second ever outdoor shoot!) And it’s so nice to see such a spread of people, ages and so many ladies shooting too!
I myself was shooting pretty well. For example pic 8 was a decent end (end 10), but the wind gusted me just as I was about to shoot, so the last shot went into the 2. LOL. In the end I scored 589, which *would* have been good enough for a Bowman 3rd Class, but alas the Long Metric III only goes up to Archer 3rd class. It was also a PB, (but as it was the first time we had ever shot this round it was PB’s all around!)
After shooting (as officiated by James Mooney) we all packed up and I was running about sorting stuff before I could eat. Chairmany stuff I guess, more on this later. Eats this year was masterfully cooked by Kyriacos John Theodorou, our BBQ king! He spend all shoot preparing the BBQ for us, but next year he will HAVE to shoot and we’ll get someone else on BBQ duties.
After food came medals in many categories, where I had to present the medals to everyone. Only took 10 medals or so before I remembered to shake peoples hands for pictures lol. Still kinda new to this Chairman lark. I managed to get 3rd place, mens recurve (presenting a medal to myself!) 1st and 2nd mens were 30 points clear of me in the 620’s with ONE point between them! My daughter snagged 1st place on the Junior Novice Category (*gasp*, nepotism!) But yes, the point is we had a good spread of archers across many categories.
It was also my Birthday today, so we had Birthday song (twice!) cake and some light Birthday roasting, (as well as pastries after the BBQ). I think we were all stuffed! Anyway as Chair, it gladdens me to see the club growing and progressing as it is. A lot of people were involved with todays shoot. Great stuff.
TLDR, Outdoor Club Champs at the club today was EPIC.
Edit
Oh! I forgot to say. 1st end at 40m, first shot went totally wayward. I *thought* it shot to the right OVER the target, so I believe I must have put it on top of the pressure button? Got very narked (but turned out that 1st shot was a 2) but then got even more narked when every shot after that was gold lol.