At a Glance

Report

One year more, one more rainy BUCS! Part 2!

The Sunday morning started very similarly to the Saturday: wet! London had turned up the Disney tunes as a lot of SUAC had kept them up late the night before. The only thing they didn’t realise was that those who were not planning on shooting the Sunday were fast asleep from copious amounts of alcohol and those awake were preparing to shoot anyway, so their plan backfired. Unfortunately, Michael Sessions was one of those asleep and he was the only one who knew how to turn the barbecue on. D’Oh! Eventually this was sorted and bacon and egg sarnies were had by all.

Due to the weather, there were lots of people who didn’t come along to shoot the Sunday despite being on the target list. Sara Rubio found herself in the odd position of being in her pyjamas at the shooting field, but also without any target buddies, meaning an archer from London was added to her target. When we got going however, Sara’s new friend pulled out and she was left on her own so had to get David Williams and his target buddies to help score her arrows as they were on the target next to her. This turned into a shuffle under the umbrella every time we needed to score between the two targets.

Half way through the shooting, Andy Howe wasn’t shooting as well as he had the previous day and most people who were shooting were tired. Isabelle Hawkins came around with Ahmed El Maghraby at this point to cheer us all up by asking for orders for MORE BACON SARNIES for lunch! This cheered a lot of people up as the rain had been coming down fairly strongly by this point and the wind had been blowing a bit too. Patrick Corning was shooting well however despite the conditions, although novice compounders Abbie Hall and Tom Reed had shot a few misses each (Tom kept shooting the targets next to his) and were struggling.

By the end of the seeding round, Sara found herself in 8th position, while Patrick was 5th in the barebows. He would later be elevated to 4th seed for the H2H as a higher seed pulled out. Ally Miller was 11th, Andy 15th, Justina Valyte 17th, Abby Slark and Tom both 20th, David 26th, Abbie 27th and Matt W 50th. David and Matt both went up one seeded place due to pull outs which nearly meant David’s opening match was against an old school friend. Abbie and Tom also ended up moving up the seeding order too.

LUNCH!

Most of those who had slept in by this point were coming out of their tents and saying hello to those shooting. Rob Cieslicki and Michael had already left though as the camp got packed down. Open practice began and it turned out that there were 2 archers in the men’s recurve draw that had to shoot off for the last place in the H2Hs.

In the first round of 64 archers for the men’s recurves, Matt W came against the 16th seed (narrowly missing Andy) and lost 6-0. David won his match 7-1 and Andy won 6-0 too. This took them through to the last 32, where the women also started as they had all got byes having seeded high enough. David came up against an archer who he had shared a target with the previous day, must silliness was had, but David lost in straight sets. Despite a slightly higher seeding, the same fate befell Andy, losing 6-2. Justina took the 16th seed to 4-4 all in a very tight match, but eventually lost the last set and the match. Abby lost by the same scoreline to a slightly higher seeded archer from London. Ally triumphed 6-2, as did Sara 6-4 in what were also close matches. Due to their low seedings, Abbie and Tom both tried hard but went out at this stage also with losses in the compound competition.

Into the last 16 went the barebows (aka Patrick), Ally and Sara. Ally was up against the 6th seed and although she put up a good fight, lost 7-1. Sara was against the 9th seed and it ended 5-5 after all the regulation ends were shot, meaning a shoot off! Sara’s arrow wasn’t as close to the centre as her opponent’s, and she also went out at this stage. Patrick started off his H2Hs with a whitewash of the 13th seed, and continued into the next round, winning 6-0 again against the 12th seed to progress to the semi finals. As most people were out by this point, Abby and Ally had packed up their respective cars and left, whilst the minibus and all the novices had to wait until Vice-Captain Patrick finished shooting!

He came up against the 1st seed in the semi-final, and just to get 2 set points he had to shoot an end of 27! Even the number 1 seed was impressed with this, shooting a very strong end, but unfortunately that was all the points Patrick was going to get and he went into the 3rd place play off having lost 6-2. At this point Abbie realised her wallet was missing from Surrey’s tent and so a search party set off to find it. Patrick continued into the bronze medal match but by this point he was getting tired. Against the third seed, he couldn’t string together some of his heroics of the semi-final and succumbed to a 6-0 defeat, recording his second 4th place 2 weeks in a row. While disappointed, Patrick was upbeat considering he hadn’t had much of a chance to shoot in the run up and he’d beaten a lot of the other barebows over the course of the day with some excellent shots.

After everyone was out, the minibus set off for home. David, Ahmed and Sam Baldwin helped to pack away, and low and behold, the sun came out! At 7pm… -_- . The last car eventually left at around this time, catching up the minibus at the service station. We all eventually arrived back in Southampton at 10pm (the incident of the ordered Chinese from Liverpool occurred, ask Sam B for details) and all the bits from the weekend were safely stored in Abbie’s garage. After such a long weekend, everyone was happy to be home!