All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
BARPC
Basingstoke Air Rifle & Pistol Club. Founded 1975
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
BARPC
Basingstoke Air Rifle & Pistol Club. Founded 1975
Quite a lot of airgun history is lost. But CSFTA have been running HFT comps since the mid 90's. Barpc came up with a lot of rules before it spread across the region.
http://www.barpc.org.uk/history.htm
Clubs in the region shoot to both sets of rules. CSFTA in the Winter League, and UKAHFT in the Southern Hunters and national series.
I've got an old flyer somewhere from about 1995 for one of our 1st HFT's which was held alongside an FT during what was then the Nockover Classic shoot, the predecessor to the Easter Bunny Bash.
The initial rules (as per Rob's in the video) were...
No fiddling with gun or scope.
You must touch the peg with part of your body.
No sitting.
Targets no further than 45 yards.
That was it, nice and simple. The rules stayed pretty much the same for a few years and the CSFTA winter HFT used these until around 1999/2000 when John and Josie took on the reigns of running the winter league and tweaked then to take out certain ambiguities such as targets closer than 7 yards and setting kill zone sizes. It was still refreshingly simple and no one cleared any courses back then.
This was mainly due to the course setters designing courses where you had to work for a target. No cleared lanes of foliage, targets in obscure places, the pegs away from line of sight so you had to shoot "off-hand" rather than resting on a peg, in short, pretty rough shooting. We didn't worry about whether you could take your glasses off for one shot but not the next. You were either a good shot or crap. You had a good day you won the prizes, a bad or normal day and you'd laugh it off in the pub afterwards. Most folks had simple rifles and 3-9X scopes. S300's and early Daystates were dominant with a scattering or Prosports and Shamals not forgetting all sorts of springers.
If someone moved off a peg, you'd just kick their boot back on to it with some appropriate comment and not call foul after the shot had been taken and insist the card was marked down.
Everyone could walk the course before shooting and discuss how they might take the shot. Banter was legendary and no one ever died, argued or fell out because of the rules. It was just a bunch of like minded people having a good day out. I'm not saying it's any different today because I no long shoot comps but it may be rose tinted glasses, but I preferred the "old" days.
At BARPC, we still use the old format as much as possible and don't shoot UKAHFT. All targets are between 7-45 yards "apart from those that aren't" to quote Gary C.
Bob
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
BARPC
Basingstoke Air Rifle & Pistol Club. Founded 1975