So this isn’t a normal shoot report as it was our shoot and of course, I didn’t shoot it, but I wanted to give our feeling on how it went.
In general, we all felt it went as well as it could have, certainly in terms of the feedback we received on the day and after. We didn’t get any really negative comments, which was great and makes all of the effort worth it – and there was a lot of effort. Anyone who attended will know that the course is on the side of a mountain and as such, there are some slopes to deal with. This makes for some amazing shots, but also a huge amount of effort in setting the course.
We spent a long time deliberating over how to set the shots. How difficult to make them, how long, how interesting, how much variation, how much slope to use. In the end, we settled on a mix of everything and added 8 optional wasp pegs to ramp up the difficulty for anyone who wanted even more of a challenge. We also added in some spread shots and multi-target faces to add even more interesting shots. We knew this wasn’t a typical NFAS field archery shoot, but we wanted to showcase what we could achieve.
If we’d set a long red peg, we made sure the white was much easier, but the overall intention was to make all of the shots hittable with any bow type and I think we did that and threw in a few easy ‘spot getters’ into the mix.
We used 12 x 3Ds on the course with the other 24 being faces. The faces were provided by Mark Duerden at Phoenix Archery, but they were all designed and created by us. Myself and Marc spent time looking for great images and then I spent literally hours creating the wound and kill zones, before sending them to Mark to produce them. Although nobody had ever seen the faces before, everyone seemed to like them and because they are printed on vinyl, they are really robust.
The real intention was to make sure everyone had a good time and would both come back, and tell their friends to join them and we hope we did that. We loved the fact that nearly all of the field waited until we had all of the scores in and stayed through the medal giving.
The only negative was the number of people that were no shows. We had 83 booked in on Saturday, but we started the shoot with 68. That said we were delighted with that number for our first shoot.
