CWG Day 2 - Ticks, Sea Mist, and Windsurfers

Another day, some more training; although there are more teams now with the Malaysians, Canadians and one of the Aussies in addition to us and the English. The plan was for a day of long range in the light winds which were forecast to start from inshore before swinging round to a lefthand offshore wind through the day.

900x was OK. The core group was small, but taking too long in the bright sunlight would often result in a low shot out in the mid-inner. Still, results were generally acceptable and we stopped for lunch, looking forward to shooting at 1000x.

Lunch is held in the athletes' lounge, a glorified tent behind the 1000x firing point. There's a reasonably good array of sandwiches, tea, coffee and am urn of soup available. Nothing terribly fancy, but tasty and filling. We'd be warned that there might be ticks in the thick grass on the range, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see one crawling across Martin's phone as we ate.

Glancing out the door before we finished eating, we could see sea mist beginning to get blown inshore by the wind, which has swung round. Unfortunately, it soon became too thick to shoot and the targets disappeared. After some debate with the RO, we decided to shoot 1000x as soon as it was safe to do so. There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing as the sentries could and then could not see the boundaries of the danger area in the bay, but eventually the sun burned off the mist and we got back on the range.

Halfway through the first detail, just as my partner was about to bang down his ninth to count... "STOP, STOP, STOP! Unload, bolts open and flags in." A windsurfer had wandered into the danger area. Rifles were shown to be safe and removed from the firing point. Five minutes went
by. Ten minutes went by. Eventually, after about a quarter of an hour, we were allowed back on to finish out shoot. We then swapped and I was about to put down my first sighter when "STOP, STOP, STOP! Unload, flags in." To cut a long story short, after about a similar amount of time, I managed to get back on the range and complete my shoot just as the practice period expired. While my previous two shoots had been a bit on the mediocre side, the final shoot at 1000x went well.

Back to the hotel for dinner with Team Wales, a bit of downtime playing Halo: Reach on the X-Box and a reasonably early bedtime.