{"id":1734,"date":"2019-02-04T09:37:03","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T09:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2019-02-10T13:40:25","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T13:40:25","slug":"monday-4th-february","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/diary\/monday-4th-february\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday 4th February"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday began with the opening ceremony for the individual Long Range World Championships, to be shot over the next 4 days: 800 yards once today; 900, 1000 then 800 on both Tuesday & Wednesday; then the last 900 and 1000 yard qualifying ranges on Thursday morning\u00a0 followed by the final for the top 10 on Thursday afternoon at 1000 yards.\"\"<\/a>We visitors were welcomed in several ways this morning.\u00a0 The New Zealand shooters were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder around the 930 yards line, facing back to all the visiting teams who were on the 1000\u00a0yard firing point.\u00a0 Several representatives from the broader community were introduced, beginning with Maori from the local town of Upper\u00a0Hutt, who spoke, sang and invoked a blessing on all assembled for the coming week.\u00a0 The New Zealand Defence Minister also spoke and we were\u00a0reminded of the significant contribution of the defence forces to shooting in New Zealand and of the substantial government grant which\u00a0has helped to defray the expenses of the championships.<\/p>\n

The visitors were then invited to walk up to and through the line of\u00a0New Zealand shooters, who shook our hands as we arrived – some theatre\u00a0adding to the dignity of the occasion.<\/p>\n

An opening shot was then fired from a benchrest, using an SMLE mk3\u00a0.303 rifle, which had been given by the New Zealand government to Sergeant Leslie Loveday, the winner of Bisley’s King’s Prize in 1919.\u00a0Barry Geange, NRANZ Patron, scored a low-right bull-5 in this, the year of his 60th Ballinger Belt.\"\"<\/a>After a couple of hours back at our hotel nearby, the team returned to\u00a0the range for a 2pm start to today’s sole shoot, at 800 yards.\u00a0 After
\nsquadding freshly issued for this week, we still found ourselves in\u00a0strings of 6 or 7, so the same as last week during the NZ\u00a0Championship. The wind was a fishtail from behind with the usual\u00a0variability in experience based on location on the range and also time\u00a0of shoot.\u00a0 This diarist’s observation was that conditions were rather\u00a0less changeable for the earliest shooters.\u00a0 This diarist was not among\u00a0them and had also been squadded on the outer end of “magpie alley”, with winds coming from behind over both shoulders simultaneously and no
\nmirage owing to the overcast skies.\u00a0 It was challenging.\u00a0 Thankfully, much of the remainder of the\u00a0team did rather better, with one score of 75 (from James Watson) and\u00a074s from David Armstrong, Jane Messer, Matt Millar and Parag Patel,\u00a0with a further 5 73s and 5 72s.<\/p>\n

In the evening, a barbecue was prepared for half the team by BBQ-masters Jack and Tom D; others went to various places for dinner, with one group served quickly enough to allow them to go for a scenic drive up the hill and over to Whitemans Valley, which they followed back down to Silverstream, pausing at one point to look down the hill, over the prison towards the Trentham range from a point close to two houses that were visible atop the hill when shooting. Gorgeous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monday began with the opening ceremony for the individual Long Range World Championships, to be shot over the next 4 days: 800 yards once today; 900, 1000 then 800 on both Tuesday & Wednesday; then the last 900 and 1000 yard qualifying ranges on Thursday morning\u00a0 followed by the final for the top 10 on Thursday afternoon at 1000 yards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gbrt.org.uk\/palma19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}