The Imperial meeting at Bisley is the main event in the fullbore shooting calendar, and the BUCS matches are the culmination of training for the club’s fullbore shooters. This year six hopefuls made the trek to Bisley – Charlie Asquith and Tim Keen are both experienced members, and were shooting in A class. Nick Branch was to shoot with us in BUCS fullbore, and competed in X class. Ellie Hoolahan, Sam Huish, and Brendan McFall made up the fresher element, all three shooting as Tyros with Sam and Brendan entering their first Imperial. Jen Barber was also planning to join us, but unfortunately was unable due to illness.
With the campsite set up and the club’s gazebo providing an HQ for the week’s activities, we set about with the shooting. The pre-grand shoots provided a good warmup and a chance to dust off the cobwebs, especially in the area of wind judgement for those at their first meeting. We did however achieve some good results in these early shoots – Brendan was lucky enough to get an early morning (and thus low wind) detail in the 1000x Lovell competition and used this to his advantage, shooting a 47.5 and coming 72nd on the prizelist, breaking his Tyro on the second day. While Brendan was worrying if he had peaked too early, the others were putting in good results in the early competitions of the grand aggregate. Sam shot a 73.9 in the 500x Daily Telegraph, coming 83rd – one place above the “Last O in”. Two days in, two tyros broken!
From Saturday until the following Thursday, the competitions of the grand aggregate are shot. Highlights of the week included Charlie’s 50.6 in the 600x Alexandra, giving him 63rd place. Tim also got a 50.4 in the 900x Duke of Cambridge, coming 71st. While quite a few members of the club were “Incorporated” by the 1000x Corporation, we didn’t let this hold us back and some good results were produced later in the week – Charlie and Tim both made the second stages of HM Queen’s Prize and St George’s, respectively, while Charlie put in an awesome display in the inter-counties match, dropping just a single point over four distances, and claiming a silver medal for Northants and Leicestershire in the long range portion of the event. Ellie and Sam also distinguished themselves in the 600x Prince of Wales competition, coming 111th and 113th respectively, both with a score of 73.9 out of 75 – Sam was only beaten on countback.
Numerous aggregate prizes were also entered by club members – Sam made it onto several armed forces prizelists thanks to his membership of SUAS, while Ellie showed that entering all the optional aggregates can pay off by collecting more than a few bars of her own. All three tyros also made the prizelist for the young rifleman’s aggregate. Charlie managed to A-class himself again by coming 165th in the Grand Aggregate, with Tim in 260th – just 3 points separated him from the A-class cutoff of 200th place.
After the grand came the main event – BUCS fullbore, made up of two separate competitions. The Musketeers is shot at 300, 500 and 600 yards, and consists of 1 sighter and 10 to count, with outside coaches allowed. The team was Ellie (captain), Tim, Sam and Nick, coached by Dave Rose with Brendan acting as reserve. Nick was also shooting the Kopalore for his national team, Guernsey, so his scores counted concurrently. Nick put in two HPS scores (50.9, 50.6) and Tim one (50.5), as the team finished second behind Exeter with a score of 583.60 out of 600. With time to spare, Brendan was given the chance to shoot for practice as well, and (perhaps just to put off the other members of the team) got his first ever HPS of 50.4 at 500 yards. It was an excellent effort all round by the team, and our best result in recent years at the Musketeers.
The next day, however, we had to tackle the 900 and 1000 yard Universities Long Range. The wind proved much more tricky out here and we saw more than one shot blown into the Magpie ring for a 3 out of a possible 5. We were only four points off the lead after 900 yards but a fairly disastrous 1000 yard shoot saw us drop a few points too many, finishing 6th with 370.30 /400, still a respectable score.
In the overall BUCS classification, Southampton were 5th with a total of 953 and 90 V bulls – only four points off the medals. This is a good result and with the calibre (to pardon the pun) of talent in some of our younger shooters we should be able to better this result in future years. Southampton’s name was also being circulated throughout the fullbore community, due both to the team’s stylish choice of club polo on our nightly visits to the Surrey RA for beverages, and also thanks to our contacts within the school and cadet shooting community. We are hopeful that we have attracted some promising young talent to the university, where they can continue shooting as members of SURC. Next year we also plan to devote more time and resources to fullbore training, and have requested support from the athletic union in our development plan specifically for this purpose. After what was an awesome week, both on and off the ranges, it seems SURC’s quest to conquer both fullbore and smallbore is definitely on the right track!
Brendan “Jesus Christ, it’s a Vulcan!” McFall.
