GBRT : South Africa 2012

Friday morning and time for the Second Stage of the State Presidents, 2 and 10 at 300, 500 and 600m. The last chance for the team members to show their skill to the team management before selection for the Protea Match which will happen on Saturday morning. Also an opportunity to try and get through to the Final on Saturday afternoon. So essentially a day of shooting in order to try and be picked to do more shooting.

The journey to the range was uneventful, except for one member of the team (Gareth) who realised about 5 metres from the entrance to the range that he had forgotten his register cards for the day. Cue a trip to the stats office before the 300m detail in order that he could get some more produced for him.

The mornings shooting also proved to be fairly uneventful, at least until the second detail at 600m. Everything was going along fine, with a little bit of wind to play around with, when suddenly, about one or two shots from the end of the shoot, a spot of water appeared on the scorebook, then another one... and then many, many more. It rained so hard that it was virtually impossible to see the target, either through the sights or spotting scope, which made taking those final shots somewhat harder than it could have been. Many tales of woe ensued, with Simon being signalled a miss for one of his last shots to count, and DC dropping his last three shots (thereby tripling his points loss for the day). DC was also particularly unhappy as he had failed on this occasion to put on his waterproofs despite having worn them for several completely dry shoots throughout the week. Nothing to do but wait until tomorrow morning to see if we had done enough to make the Final.

The afternoon was a chance for some time off the range, something that has been in short supply over the last week. People variously slept, ate, went shopping, sat in the bar or did all of the above in some combination. Team management went into a huddle for a few hours with everyone's scorebooks and wet towels wrapped around their heads in preparation for the team announcement at 5:30.

At the allotted hour the team was announced as follows: Alwyn, Jonny, Dave, Jon, Simon, Chris, Rick, Mick, Ben, Pete, Gareth and Colin doing the shooting, with Jon, Alwyn, Neil and Gary coaching under the guidance of DC as main coach. We've done all the preparation, so all that's left is to get a good night's sleep, and shoot as well as we know we are able to tomorrow.

Quote of the day goes to Lauren for, consecutively "my bedding is on the floor" and "the action is on my bed."

(In a departure from the norm, I have been asked to provide some context to this to save Lauren's blushes, so I should point out that this is because she had to take her rifle apart following the downpour earlier.)