Hi,
I started shooting way back in ’71 when I joined the forces (Funny thing that). I got realy serious about the sport of shooting in the late 80s / early 90s. At that time I got hooked into black powder shooting and had lots of fun with that discipline, even building my own rifle in .32 cal. I was introduced to competition shooting attending the black powder NZ nationals in Nelson with some success even getting a bronze medal in the running boar event, also attended the nationals at Golden Downs a year or two later. The .32 rifle I made performed great in that running boar event and has since proved just the ticket on rabbits.
I became involved in smallbore shooting around 1996 when my daughter wanted to shoot with the local girl’s college so we started shooting together at the RSA range on Monday nights, I was only doing it to lend a bit of support you understand and thought it made give me a little discipline for my black powder shooting.
Well it wasn’t long before the bug bit and the rest is history as they say. I have gone from strength to strength since then and have been in the SI team both indoor and outdoor a number of times but haven’t quite made any NZ teams yet. I have been a member of the Marlborough team on each of the 4 occasions they have won the A & F since I began smallbore shooting.
Still shooting with the RSA club in their nice new range which has 8 usable mounds as well as provision for 8 Air Rifle mounds. The old range under the old Blenheim RSA had 6 mounds of which only 5 could be used at any one time due to the proximity of the side walls

Cheers The Grumpy one

Hmmm, do I get a lollipop if I guess your first name? =D

Fluff

Thought I'd stick some favorite photos up on here:

Actually there were three ranges there in operation all at the same time, 25yds, 50M & 100yds. Bill Drayton in association with some others from the Christchurch Assn organised it on 2 separate occaisions in his warehouse in Hornby and of course he can only do that when there is not much stuff stored in there.
Those big cylinders are actually rolls of paper which if my memory serves my right weigh about 2 tonn.
It was really great being able to shoot those longer distances without having to worry about the wind at all. BTW it was actually snowing outside at the time.

Here's some more of the Warehouse range for you Environs

Ooh! The first pic of the 2nd bunch. The staging area looks to be forward of the firing line!

Yeah your right and no excusses for that but ..... well outside the recognised firing cone and the loading rules were strictly enforced, ie no closing of the action until the rifle on the shoulder with the rifle pointing towards the target. And there were plenty of rolls of paper to hide behind but unfortunately these folk chose not to!

Yeah, I was just yankin' ya chain. Might be different though if it was a newbie night huh? You know, the ones where you have to replace light fittings and mound numbers etc, lol

Yeah, Know what you mean. As you can see, our RSA range is basically a concrete bunker and everything is on the surface of that concrete including the wiring to the lights and there sprinkler system. We do take groups through the range from time to time and a couple of weeks ago had some scouts through and one of them managed to hit the conduit carrying wiring to some hot points and of course the conduit being made of plastic didn't offer any resistance. fortunately it was connected through an RCD device. One of our biggest worries is the sprinkler system cause if that gets set off accidently by a stray shot, it'll cost the club for the fire brigade callout now as we have used up all our get out of jail free cards setting off the smoke detectors when setting up the range (they didn't like the sawdust and welding smoke).
With groups like that it doesn't matter how many times and how hard you strees the loading procedure there is always one who will forget, that wire I mentioned has been shot twice in the same place, you'd think it had a 10.1 on it.