Sunday’s WA1440 was the last chance to shoot a full day’s round ahead of the Senior Club Championships on the 25th. The usual suspects turned up to find that while the temperatures were high, there was a tricky wind blowing across the field at the target end that made things challenging to say the least.
Once again Rhys and Dave Moore found themselves up against Pete Mumford in the Gents Compound and once again Rhys romped home to a convincing victory, though it was actually his father Dave who made the best start. Dave’s opening half dozen arrows were impressive, but he immediately had a slump in form which resulted in a disappointing 90m score. Pete Mumford had his own agenda, namely that of overcoming the sighting issues which have dogged his season. Pete the overall low score did not reflect the progress he had made over the course of the day. His score was not helped by his failure to notice that he had dropped an arrow into the grass as he was returning them to his quiver. While Pete always carries extra arrows in his quiver, his habit of counting the number of arrows he has left, rather than counting the number he has shot meant that he only loosed five arrows on the next end and had to record the sixth, un-shot, arrow as a miss.
Joy Gough as the only active female Compounder currently at the Club only has herself to beat and generally sets herself the target of scoring at least 300 at each of the four distances that comprise the WA1440. The awkward breeze that tended to swat the arrows over to the right, made things difficult but Joy was able to meet her self-imposed challenge during the morning session. The afternoon session proved to be a bit of a disappointment. Two misses at 50m put a dent in her score and another miss at 30m had her tutting and shaking her head as she came off the shooting line. The one bright spot at the 30m was Joy’s victory in the ‘360 Challenge’. This is a bit of fun the Compound archers indulge in each week, that is seeing who can stay in the inner x-10 ring of the target at 30m. (If an archer scored an x-10 with every arrow they would get a distance total of 360). Joy managed to keep her first three arrows in the zone, Rhys two, Dave one and Pete zero. Joy’s yelp of triumph was as understandable as it was amusing.
The Gents Recurve was another three-way tie between James Hill, Alex Allen-Snell and Danny Cowin. None of them exactly shone at the longer distances, all three had multiple misses at 90m. James, normally solid at 70m, had an absolute nightmare this time out. The addition of the juniors in the afternoon session put pressure on the number of available bosses since a range of distances for the differing age groups were required. This meant that Danny and Alex were forced onto the small target faces usually reserved for the Compound shooters which only scores down to 5, while James was able to stay on the larger Recurve face (which scores down to 1) alongside Nathan Kinrade who was shooting a Short Metric. It was the first time Danny had ever shot on a Compound face and as far as he was concerned it would be the last. He haemorrhaged points as the number of misses (which would not have been misses on the standard Recurve face) mounted up. Alex who had experience of the smaller target was no where near as good as he had been on his previous attempt and notched up four misses of his own. He recovered his form at the final distance to take a comfortable win. Danny’s disastrous 50m opened the door for James and a decent 30m saw James draw level. As James had a higher number of 10’s overall, he was awarded second place.
Lone Lady Recurver Barbara Harris made her usual slow start but recovered well enough at the remaining three distances to record a season’s best score in spite of struggling with an elbow injury.
As well as Nathan, other Juniors included his sister Eloise who joined Ellyn Hill to shoot a Short Metric V and Lucy-may Hill who shot a Short Metric III.
Results WA1440: Gents Compound- 1. R.Moore 144/1326/61/24, 2.D.Moore 144/1256/43/15, 3.P.Mumford 142/1177/31/10. Ladies Compound- J.Gough 141/1210/34/11. Gents Recurve- 1.A.Allen-Snell 137/1036/21/7, 2.J.Hill 133/818/10/4, 3.D.Cowin 127/818/3/0. Ladies Recurve- B.Harris 142/1072/18/1. U16 Boys-N.Kinrade 72/521/10/3. U14 Girls- L-M Hill 38/156/1/0. U12 Girls- 1.E.Kinrade 70/459/3/1, 2.E.Hill 67/423/5/0.
Isle of Man Archery Club 