Monday 21 November 2016

Shooting at the Lord Roberts Centre

An hour or so up the road from us is the National Shooting Centre at Bisley.  It's where the outdoor meeting of the year is held every year and Portsmouth City shooters know it mostly for the ELEY finals that we sometimes qualify to shoot in (see here and here).

However, one of our members pointed out that there was nothing stopping us from booking some practice time on the Lord Roberts Range, so this weekend, that's what we did!

The Lord Roberts Range is a 50m semi-outdoor range (the points are in the building, but the targets are outside) with electronic targets, like what the international matches are shot on (and if you haven't seen one of those, scroll down to the bottom of this post to see a couple of recent ISSF finals).  The main difference between this sort of shooting and what we usually do - perhaps more than the distance or maybe even the weather conditions - is the number of shots: unlimited sighters, and 60 competition shots, all in one go.

When you are only used to doing a 10-shot indoor comp card, 60 shots on the trot is a whole other animal.  Even if you are used to doing outdoor matches on cards, those are only 20 competition shots at a time and then there's a break while you change your card.  That's not the case here; you can and have to just keep shooting and shooting and shooting.  And when you finish, you get a big print out of all your shots, your final score, and the placement of all those shots.




And just to be clear, the placement of these shots is recorded pretty accurately, down to the tenth of a point.


Here's Adam and Marian showing us how to do it in style (the monitors don't actually flicker like you see, that's just the video recording).


We had a great time up at the Lord Roberts Centre and we'll be sure to go again in 2017, though we might wait for it to warm up a little first, as it is already a bit chilly.





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