Greetings to all our Club Members
We now have over 100 members world wide and 40 in New Zealand. It's really good to see so many enter the monthly postal match but there is always room for more results. Don't forget there are 2 Chocolate Fish up for prizes each month. It isn't always the highest score that gets the grand prize but sometimes someone who has achieved a PB or has just put in that extra effort can take the prize. The main thing is that you get the air pistol out of the cupboard and fire some shots.
Again our club held the annual shoot between the Ranfurly and Naseby Fire Brigades. About 20 people turned up and took part in the fun shoot which requires imense skill! This year the Naseby Brigade won fairly and squarely - I think?
March saw us hold our first "Graded" shoot - ISSF style. Rob Potter and Scruffy (read his adventures on other pages) made the big journey down from Auckland to visit their home range before they headed back to OZ. We all had a great time.Breakfast at the range was introduced to all the competitors, not a common event within New Zealand, but common within Australia. All competitors adapted very quickly to this new ???. Nothing like bacon and eggs cooked on the barbecue to settle the body's centre of gravity. Bert and Scruffy made a prize winning combination and cleaned up all the other competitors in each event but were generous and shared the prizes amongst them all. It turned out that you didn't have to win to get a first prize!!
Quite a few of our members attended the Australian Nationals in Brisbane over Easter. Many people from through out Australia who arrived as non members, left the Nationals as members, after being enticed by our enthusiastic local members to join the club. It was good for us New Zealanders to catch up with old friends and make many more new ones.
After the Nationals we felt that we could all do with some expert coaching, so we could put on a better show at the next major competition. We approached our friend Paul McCormack to see if he would like to visit our part of the country. For better (for us) or worse (for him) he said yes. Yippee!! The first week of October was decided upon and despite Annsett best effort to put a stop to the visit Paul made the trek to the deep south. What a fantastic week it was. The weather did the decent thing, for a change, and gave us fine warm days. We had to work hard but managed to eat and relax between sessions. Twenty five people attended, some for a few days and some for the whole week. Already two of the members who attended have posted new National records and one International record while other have shot PB's and are rapt. Thanks Paul very much.
The Oceania's have been again and this saw a few members meet yet again. The majority of our members came away with medals - well done to you all. Scruffy and Bert had to sit on the bench and gave moral support to us when they were not chatting to the judges.
Alexandra's one day shoot will be the venue for our next away competition. Our members are often the majority of the competitors with visitors from Christchurch and other clubs all travelling over for the day. The South Island is lucky to have quite a few Graded Shoots thought the summer season.
The New Zealand Nationals will be held in Auckland over the second weekend of March 2002. It would be good to see a large number of our members come and compete and just catch up with each other again.
All the best for your shooting and we look forward to seeing your scores up each month.
Happy Shooting
Jill Smith
Club Captain