Bank Holiday Monday 25th May 2009 was warm, still and dry with high cloud and therefore perfect shooting conditions for a keenly contested Bedfordshire County Championships in English Sporting.  The shoot also incorporated the annual Martin Scoley Memorial trophy competition.
The shoot was notable for the  a number of personal bests and for being a shoot “of two halves”  with my analysts hat on the average for stands 1 – 5 was about 10% less than that for the remainder of the shoot.  Ed Solomons eventual winner of the shoot and the Martin Scoley Trophy was no exception to this trend dropping just one target of the last 66, one of the floppy ones in 122! 
In common with most of the feedback I received Ed said that he thought that it was a lovely layout with something for everyone, he was regretting a night on the beer on Sunday though and thought that without it he “could have shot a monster.”  As part of the structure of the Martin Scoley memorial day Bob Scoley has donated two pairs of NYX shooting glasses.  The winners of these were drawn at random from B and C class shooters on the day with Chris Howard and Tony Davison coming out of the hat as winners.  Please contact Bob on 07885 623523 to arrange collection/delivery of your glasses.
On the county front one of the personal bests I mentioned earlier was from Joe Heast who continued he recent run of form to record a C class and Junior trophy win with a very good 86.  Joe’s score was based on consistency with a 86% on both halves of the shoot with 5 “straights” notably on stand 2 (nasty long battue with a fast looking but actually slow close crosser as the report bird), stand 7 (mini crosser with battue on report and stand 9 – the rabbits.  Coincidently (or perhaps something to work on here Joe) all the straights were on stands of 3 pairs rather than 4.  Joe also managed to draw with AA junior Tristram Allen from last year’s all conquering Leicester team so I think congratulations all round – now if you could just stop breaking your gun!
In the ladies Michala Hart posted the early lead with a 61 which Michala was disappointed with citing number 63 from 101 shooting excuses “Torn knee ligament restricting movement and set up” and knew that this would not be enough.  This proved to be the case as Lorna Leonard came in with a 67 to take the ladies title for the umpteenth time but the first for a few years – congratulations Lorna.
In Veterans Malcolm Jenkins and Roger Bravery led the field with 80 and 77 respectively for Malcolm  to regain his county title.
In seniors Adrian Jeffries set the early pace with an 89 that included a 3 on stand three which Adrian felt would cost him. This proved to be the case as the shoot unfolded, defending champion John Stanton equalled AJ’s score leaving these two on joint AA class winners but just short of the county title.  By rights Andrew Clifton should be the holder of the county championship but after a fine 93 which included a run of 5 stands straight  from the start.  Unfortunately Andrew refused to accept the title on the basis that he doesn’t feel that the ground owner should take prizes from a shoot on his own ground.  We have to accept Andrew’s decision but I feel that it does devalue the championship a little – he may own the traps but he still has to hit all the targets!  All this notwithstanding it was left to yours truly to pull a personal best 90 out of the hat and accept the county championship for 2009.  Following a poll on the website we have provided medals for the top county shooters in each class at the shoot and the winners of each of these was as follows:

AA:  Not awarded as we expected a AA class shooter to win the championship.
A:  Paul Burgoine.
B: Ben Pay
C: Joe Heast

The committee will review the use of these medals in future as the winners were not really what we expected this year as a result of the unexpected scores this year.

Raffle:
Thanks to the sterling efforts of Tony Pay we ran a very successful raffle raising £170 for county funds Prizes are as follows:
Camera and digital frame:  Terry Watts
Brandy :    Lesley Gifford
Champagne   Jack Nixon
Scotch    John Garratt
Beer    Colin Meeks
Beer    Simon Jackson

Qualifying:
The following tables show those that have qualified for the county team for the inter-counties championships to take place on 27th September at Mid Norfolk.  If you name is highlighted in green then you are qualified – please let me know as soon as possible if you cannot (or do not want to) take your place.  In seniors there was a three way tie in 8th qualifying position and the performance over the best 3 shoots of the series was used to decide the order of qualifying.