A large Danesfield group, including me, is going to the Somerset Indoor Championships in November, so I decided to understand the competition process before then and entered an Exmouth Archers indoor competition at the end of October.

After booking in at the Exmouth Archers site — own ground and indoor range — the first challenge became obvious. Compound and Recurve archers were shooting on 20cm 3 spot targets. I had never shot at these tea plate-sized targets before.

My target companions were all compound archers; their accuracy was a little depressing but not surprising since one of them sported a GB shirt.

Shooting three arrows within the 2 minutes shown on the timing clocks was not a problem, but the 10 seconds available for the switchover between the first archer detail and the second proved a bit of a scrabble at times.

Also, I was caught out by the alternating nature of the shooting. For each end, the order of shooting for each pair of archers on each ‘butt’ changed. So, I was the last detail for one end and the first for the next.
Scoring – where arrows landed had to be marked on the target before removing arrows so that bouncers could be identified. Scoring was on paper and an App on Exmouth supplied mobiles. This gave a backup check on the manual score addition and showed a real-time result on a large screen behind the waiting line.

All very clear and easy to follow once you know what is going on!
The final score? Hmmmmh – no surprise I didn’t shoot to my Handicap/Classification. If there had been a wooden spoon, I would have won it, but it was a good experience, and now I know what to expect in November.

Exmouth archers — great facilities and a very welcoming team.

Steve Robertson –