what distance was that???

[robbo]

After announcing mrs robbo's limb error it's only fair that I come clean about an error of mine that happened at the back end of last summer.

Had arranged to meet a couple of members up the field one sunday morning for a short metric round. As usual I was the first to arrive (impatient as ever) so I proceeded to get the field set up ready for the shoot.

We proceeded with the sighters and were all confused in the fact that we were all low, some even going right under the boss. There was some frantic sight checking and cross checking with the trusty sight mark book...'everything seems ok' was the general remark when we had finished checking our figures.

...after about the first 18 arrows or so and much talk about why we started out so low we were returning from the boss...and as I remember it I walked over the 50M disc that is in the ground...

I'd only gone and stuck the boss at the 60yard marker rather than the 50M one . After much micky taking the boss was placed where it should be and sight marks also returned to where they should be.

In my defence, only the metric discs on our field are marked with what they are, but the 60yard mark has a face on it which at certain angles on a sunday morning resembles black felt tip saying 50M...yeah I know...there's no defence.

[Tarkwin]

Several summers back we were measuring up the distances, driving pegs into the ground, shooting line, 20, 30, 40 etc etc.

when we'd done we set up the bosses, and I thought "that's never 50yds".

It transpired that the measure we'd used had suffered an injury in its time and had been trimmed by 10yds. Apparently the person who normally did this always factored this in.

T.

[Keithie]

Some years ago the shooting field for the Kate Kennedy Silver Arrow, the opener for the Scottish season, a York / Hereford, was marked out at 100, 80 and 60 metres by mistake. It took some time for the competitors to realise why their arrows were falling so low!

[Little Miss Purple]

Excellent - what more can I say??

[Gold Flinger]

Have you ever noticed that archers are so confident in their sightmarks, that they can supposedly tell if the target has been placed at 100 yards instead of 90 metres?

These are the same archers that will tell you that their sightmark drops when the sun goes in!

Who needs a tape measure, we should just use a smart alec archer!

[Cakemeister]

Just don't try it in a Portsmouth

[Furface]

I recall the one evening I spent marking our field last season. No one else had turned up, and the field was unmarked because no one else had bothered. So Littlest F and I started; line up with the two posts lengthwise, two posts sideways, and measure. Jolly fun, and we had done the first few marks. Then Chairman turns up (aka Cakemeister's coach) and starts measuring the shorter distances from the spot where he "knows" the shooting line ends. He is, of course, lining up with a different lengthways mark, so his line nowhere near meets our line. Then up turns Cakemeister's rival, and starts marking up from Chairman's starting point to the correct alignment post; naturally, as chairman's starting poing is wrong, this line also meets neither of the others. Between us we have only one measure long enough, which is constantly being passed between the three marking parties.. Funnily enough, all three lines also develop doglegs.
Meanwhile, former chairman (aka Longdoc, I think) and Mrs FC arrive at other side of field, set up a target where they think it should go, fire a National set of twigs, and go.
Perhaps I should mention that we started at the side of the field we did because, over the winter we had built a fence across the end of the ground, and hidden the mark on the tree we used for lengthways marking there.
[It was earlier in the season that one member, frustrated at the extension of football usage of our range, had completed his attempts at marking the field by spraying three extra penalty spots, together with the legend "Guess"]
This year, we are begging the groundsman to do it.