Mike Duffy reports on a charity shoot from Tawd Vale
At our recent AGM we found we had a Sunday left in our busy calendar, so it was decided to have a sporter club shoot and BBQ. while also raising money for charity.
One of our committee is a former member of the armed forces and he also raises money for the Three Rifles Charity, which supports service personnel past and present. So the idea was set, but what type of shooting were we going to do that day?
Then I remembered chatting to Mike Hurney at The Shooting Party about the new AFO15 and AFO16 ptinking rifles he had just brought into the country. I thought, ‘big boys with military-style airguns, what could be better?’
After a phone call to Mike,explaining about the charity. he had no hesitation loaning us two rifles for the side shoot and throwing in a prize for the raffle to all who entered.
The Tawd VaLe members turned up on the Saturday to set up a great course then have a BBQ and camp over ready for the Sunday morning.
Shoot-0ff
0n the day everyone had a great time with lots of friendty banter and legpulling. The comp ended with a threeway shoot off, including husband and wife team Dave and Paula Schofield. creating a closely fought match, which Dave just scraped through to become the winner.
White alt this was going on, shooters were enthusiastically queuing up for the side shoot. We had set up three challenges, which had to be taken standing with only five shots per challenge, and more points for the distant targets. First was a dual silhouette with targets at 10 and 15 yards, where the brave shooters could try either the easy 10-yarders or the difficutt 1.5-yarders for more points.
What I didn’t tell them was that I had not zeroed the guns, so all being modest they tried the-fifteen yarders and every time a target went down a big cheer brought laughter from other shooters on the course and ptinking range.The second challenge was four knockdown targets at 10, 15, 20 and 25 yards which you could take any way you wanted, but being generous I used HFT scoring and a couple of half points to stop the tears.
The third chatlenge was a speed shoot with four different-ranged targets, where the shooter had the rifle pointing at the ground ahead and on the word’go’the target was raised for five seconds whereupon they had to aim and shoot in a random order.
The scores for each challenge were separate to allow different winners.
The AF015 was fitted with a speed sight which tempted some, and traditional shooters used the open sighted AF016, but both rifles were great fun.
The trigger is only a single-stage,but for a ptinking rifle it is more than sufficient.
Laughter
I have not heard so much laughter and mickey taking out of a group of people without being in a pub. For half the day, father and son team Richard and Nathan Gordon ruled the comp, but when the main shoot finished, the kids were let loose to come and have a go and then Dave Schofield managed to pip two challenges at the post.We would like to say a big thank you to Mike and the Team at the The Shooting Party for their support with the loan of the rifles and donation of the raffle prize, also to Sportsmarketing for their generous donation of a prize with no hesitation,and local company ‘Edmundson Electrical of Widnes’for other prizes.