Having gone Indoors the previous week, the Club popped outside again to complete the last of the Outdoor Trophies. The round in question was the Windsor Trophy shoot. This consists of three dozen arrows, shot at each of three distances: 60/50 & 40 yards. It uses five zone scoring: 9,7,5,3,1 and is divided simply by bow type, with highest score for Compound, Recurve and Tradbow lifting the respective Trophy irrespective of gender.
The weather was kind, to begin with, glorious sunshine without a breath of wind. Having been an Island Games year, the club had concentrated on metric distances in preparation, so no one had sight marks for yards, which meant everyone was “guestimating”.
The last two trophy shoots had produced some upsets with unlikely winners lifting the Trophy, but Sunday’s competition played out exactly to the form book. In the Compound division Rhys Moore was odds on favourite. He dialled in quickly, and it soon became a matter of wondering not how many points he would win by, but how many points he would drop from the maximum available score of 972. The answer was nothing. Rhys did not stray out of the gold the entire day, maxing the round to take the trophy with style. The question then became who would be the runners up. Dave Moore took the honours in that race, with Les Corrin coming from behind to pip Pete Mumford for third. Westy struggled to adjust to the second distance before recovering to max the final distance, but it was too late, and he found himself at the bottom of the table.
The largest field of the day came in the Recurve division with seven archers vying for the trophy and it was Jonathan Gordon who finished off an excellent year with victory. He finished 62 points ahead of his nearest rival Erin Hainge. Erin was handicapped by virtue of having wound some weight onto her limbs, so the metric sight marks that everyone else was using to guess the likely setting for the imperial distances were useless to her. Tom Rogers forgot to bring his metric sight marks with him, so he too had nothing to work from and it took him a while to find his range. He slipped into third place four points behind Erin. A slow start by Richard Hainge and misses at the first and last distances relegated him to fourth. Barbara Harris who peppered the centre of the target during the two practice ends just ran out of gas as the shoot went on and she was so tired by the final dozen that five of her arrows remained in her quiver un-shot. Her efforts were only good enough for fifth place. Peter Howland, like Westy, struggled to adjust to the second to the second distance and the damage could not be undone by the good shooting he put in at 40y and he had to settle for sixth. Emily O’Hara had a nightmare of a shoot, and it wasn’t until the final six arrows that she showed what she was capable of. The Indoor season will give her the chance to focus on what is working and eliminate what is not.
James Hill joined Colin Moore and Stan Gorry in the Trad bow division but found himself sadly off the pace. Stan put in a solid round but Colin, showing a return to form, led from start to finish to lift the Trophy.
Results Windsor Trophy: Compound- 1.R.Moore 108/972/108, 2.D.Moore 108/956/100, 3.L.Corrin 108/946/96, 4.P.Mumford 108/944/94, 5.A.Westmorland 108/740/95. Recurve- 1.J.Gordon 108/926/86, 2.E.Hainge 108/866/62, 3.T.Rogers 108/862/59, 4.R.Hainge 105/807/53, 5.B.Harris 97/676/32, 6.P.Howland 90/512/21, E.O’Hara 29/143/3.
Isle of Man Archery Club 