Day 5 – Tue 21st March – First day on Range

The 21st March in South Africa is the “Human Rights” bank holiday, set on this date as the anniversary of the establishment of the South African Human Rights Commission. While the majority of South Africa took a well-earned day off, for the GBRT Rifle team, it was very much the opposite. It was our first day of shooting and the entire team was at breakfast, on average, a good 2 hours earlier than previous days. The tour was about to begin in earnest. 

The buses departed at 7:45am from the hotel, loaded with rifle kit, lunches (packed ourselves in an assembly line manner that would have made Henry Ford proud) and gallons of water. As you may have guessed, the morning of the 21st was very much like the morning of the 20th, blue skies and very hot!

We arrived to the beautiful General De Wet rifle range shortly after 8:15am and promptly set up shop close to the targets for our first distance, 300m. For those reading this who have never been shooting in South Africa, it is one very large range surrounded by beautiful hilly South African countryside, but the range itself is quite barren, with gravel rows at each firing point for the shooters – nothing like the quasi-marshland that is Bisley! The distances are in metres (not yards as you will find in ranges in the UK) and distances are set to 300, 500, 600, 800 and 900 metres. We had planned to do 3, 6, 8 and 9 today – in a 2 & 10 coached format (2 convertible sighting shots and 10 shots to count) in 4 separate teams. Today was just a practice, for the team to bed in their rifles, test out any new rifle set ups and “get their eye in” so to speak.

After a delayed start where the team frantically searched for shade from the ever increasing strength of the Sun, we eventually got underway starting at 300m. Due to the delayed start we would be skipping 800m, and we had scheduled to have our first team photo after lunch on completion of 600 yards.

The day was perfect for the team as a starting point for the 2 weeks ahead. Our main match (the Australia match) is less than a week away, so having everyone acclimatize to the conditions and heat as quickly as possible will be crucial. Scores for everyone can be found at /archive/sa2017/results/ and tomorrow begins the Freestate Championships, the team’s first set of individual competitions. Bring on day 2 of shooting.