South African Team
Layne Chisholm equalled the British Record with his LBP in the Bianchi match with a 1918 159x and Clive Ferguson shot a 1914 158x for a new personal best score. Meanwhile Mel Beard was shooting well with his LBR and his final score was only 1 point short of setting a new British Record with a 1909 150x. The Advancing Target matches attract a lot of entries and Mick Tedesco’s excellent winning score of 179 29x in the C/F Classic event was also good enough to beat most of the shooters that were using scopes to shoot the match with. On the Speed Steels Alan Convery was a man on a mission averaging 2.06s for all 5 plates on each run to beat John Chambers for the win in the GRSB match. Alan also took top honours by a mere .04 seconds with his LBP for an overall time of 46.13s which again was very slick shooting. Along with the many personal best scores shot during the meeting, a total of 31 Phoenix records were broken which as far as I know of has never been achieved before during one meeting so well done to everyone concerned. For me personally, the best performance of the meeting had to be Chris West cleaning the Bianchi centre fire match with a 1920 160x, setting a new British Record in the process. The Bianchi is one of those matches where everything has to come together just right on the day, which is pretty hard to do given the diversity of the 4 individual matches but Chris kept his nerve together and did it in style finishing off on the Mover match, so a sincere well done to you mate!
As well as having fun on the range during the day, everyone usually gets together in the evenings
36 Target Shooter
to wind down and share a meal and a few beers together and this year was no exception. Whether you were lucky enough to be invited to drink the local fire water that the South Africans had brought over for their barbecue, attended the German night at the Spott or the R.O’s bash, or simply just went down to the local pub with a group of friends, everyone seemed to be having a good time and were enjoying themselves and this is what our sport is all about.
The wide variety of shooting disciplines that the Phoenix caters for will probably allow most competitors to shoot every firearm that they own, regardless of the type or calibre during the same weekend which is pretty unique really, and is probably the main reason why it attracts over 550 competitors each year. Back in 1997 we only had a Marlin and a 10/22 at the most, which meant that you could shoot quite a few or the different types of matches at a GR competition as you only had 2 guns to use. Over the years though we have changed the rules to incorporate LBR’s, LBP’s, Classic and Open class rifles into the mix, and quite rightly too as it has given the shooters a much broader range of disciplines to choose from depending on what type of firearm they own. The down side of this for me though is that you can now shoot the 1500 & Bianchi with 6 types of firearms, and as I enjoy the challenges that these big matches have to offer, it takes me 2 whole days just to shoot them and that’s only with a GRCF, GRSB, LBP & LBR. It then takes me at least another half day to shoot 4 of the “shorts” matches to count for my team scores, leaving me with little or no time to shoot
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