A lovely sunny day saw a good entry for the second Bedfordshire Qualifier on 15th March at Sporting Targets. 

The course was well recieved with a few of the targets proving very testing. In particular the new stand in the roadway caught many out with most shooters only managing half. I didn't see the course early in the day but I can imagine that the sun may have been an issue here early on. The basin's long battue and midi combination presented no visibilty issues but proved costly for many with the most frequent score on here being 5 with the battue requiring some fairly serious "lead".  The towers claimed their usual high number of cards with the most frequent score again a 5.  The last stand also proved testing with a long dropping looper proving very difficult to hit for many, in fact there was only one 'straight' on this stand all day.

In terms of Bedfordshire qualifiying Gill Whinnett became our first confirmed qualifier with another win in Ladies, looks like Gill is the lady to beat at the moment!

In Vets Malcolm Jenkins shot an 81 to lead the way with Pete Green 10 behind.  Lou Porter leads the overall standings. 

Juniors saw Joe Heast follow-up his recent master class with Micky Rouse, Stuart Clarke and Carl Bloxham with a personal best 71 and his first class win.  Well done Joe!  At this point I would like to thank everybody who has put their hand in their pocket and/or given up time to support the juniors.  Joe is one of the lads who has benefited from this support and it is great to see it starting to pay dividends.  Word of warning to Joe though; You had a head start in the others - they will be after you. 

In the seniors the "big boys" all seemed think as they came back in that the course would yield a 92 - 93 and that it was only a matter of time before "someone did it".  Steve Leonard set the early pace with an 87 this was matched around lunchtime with Ed Solomons after he "carelessly" dropped 5 in the quarry after a snooze in the sun whilst waiting for his turn to shoot.  John Stanton, Fred Kidd and Andrew Clifton all pushed Steve with Andrew falling prey to the going away bird off the 60 foot tower.  All this left the way open for a bit (actually a lot) of a shock as yours truly managed to card a personal best of 88, I guess there may be a few people even more surprised than me at that one but hey it made for a good night down the pub!

The raffle in support of the juniors was again well supported and winners were as follows:

Whiskey:  Alan Joyner,  50 Practice: Dave Pontefract,  White Wine: Mike Sargeant,  Red Wine: Micheal Radford, Cartridges (25): Debbie Garron.

The money that has been raised for the juniors has been used amongst other things to offer each of the juniors a place on one of the master classes series that Sporting Targets have been running.  Andrew kindly offered these to the juniors at a special rate.  As a said above the effort being put into helping the juniors along is beginning to pay off so let's hope we can build on what has been achieved so far.

All Beds results from the shoot are below and full results can be found at:

http://www.sportingtargets.co.uk/?p=competition_archive

 Cheers

 John Taylor