Roseville Rifle Club Australia

The lifeblood of any club is the membership. While some of our club members choose to go to various competitions and are recognised in the website writeups, quite a few don’t do competitions or they take a break from competitions. But, whether you compete or don’t compete, we all have one thing in common, the Saturday afternoon shoot at Hornsby. It is not mandatory…. so we do it for the fun of it, to seek a personal best, for load testing, to learn new skills/disciplines or really any other reason. But what really keeps us at Roseville are the friendships and comradery; particularly in the clubhouse after a day of shooting on a Saturday whether it happened to be hot / cold / wet / windy.

So looking at this year’s club shooting, according to the stats, we have 20 shooting in Target Rifle (equally split in A/B/C grade), 7 in F-TR, 6 in F-Standard (A or B) and 6 in Sporter Hunter. But, as Mark Twain once said “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable”. By which we mean:

1. at least 7 people shoot in 2 disciplines so are double counted in those numbers
2. not all of these are regular shooters in that discipline
3. we have some club members who were unable to attend in the first half of the year but who are looking to come in the second half of the year
4. we have some regular visitors who may not be counted in those numbers because they have not yet taken out a membership.

Overall we have a good healthy mix of males / females / U25s / veterans / long-time members / new members / stalwarts and occasional shooters. Basically a good bunch of people who are at various stages of their shooting career.

We are the “Duty Club” this month which means covering the duties of range officer / butts officer / set up / knock down for the full bore range. This is where the club spirit shows the most. Thanks to everyone in the club that pitches in to help make sure the range is set up and runs (almost) like clockwork. Everyone helps when they can – and we appreciate the time people give to the club particularly in “Duty Club” months.

So lets talk about this week’s shoot which was a typical Saturday afternoon with this week’s distance being 500m. It was hot, dry and sunny so we put up the tents to help relieve the heat on the mound for shooters and scorers alike. Overall we had only 17 shooters completing their normal details of 2+15 and 2+10 (noting unfortunately some others didn’t complete both details due to various reasons). There was a bit of wind and some changeable mirage which took a few people by surprise. But some people showed their mettle sending in some solid scores and some Personal Bests (looking right at you Christie Verney!).

To show how the afternoon changed, we had only 2 “possibles” (75/75 or 90/90) in the first detail, but we had 5 possibles (50/50 or 60/60) in the second detail. There were also 2 possibles in the training part of the day. We had 2 highly coveted pin-holes this week (Phill Hodder and Ian Palmer) in the business end of the shoot. For something a little bit different, the range officers had a good chance to practice their “cease fire” drill as a late-in-the-day gust of wind took 2 tents on a bit of a ride (tents were secured at the front but in the haste of putting them up, the rear anchors were not properly secured – oops). But this slight inconvenience was well handled by our trained range officers.

Associate member Michael Cuda (aka “The Baracuda”) dropped in for a visit but couldn’t be convinced to shoot – so, as the saying goes “he didn’t drop a shot all day”.

For those that stayed to the end, Phill Hodder and Adam Beale did a Bisley shoot where there are 2 shooters on the same target doing shot by shot one after the other. Talk about a nail biter –> 49-5 to 50-4 with only one dropped shot between the two of them and unfortunately that one was the last counting shot for Adam. Well done to Phill – the coach prevails!

See you next Saturday!

Janet Beale