Easter Bisley 2025
With 23 members attending, including 14 new faces, CURA returns to Bisley to kickstart the fullbore season.
This year’s Easter Bisley started off on a leisurely Monday morning spent setting novices up with their newly-assigned target rifles in the garden of the English Eight. The novices also tried their hand at plotting with a short plotting exercise in the afternoon.
The next two days involved coached TR shooting at 300x, 600x and 900x in relatively easy winds, allowing our seniors and novices alike to get good zeroes in preparation for the all-important Cap v. Sec match on Thursday.
While last year we boasted about fielding two full VIIIs for Cap v. Sec, this year we put together three teams, with Amy having to step up and lead the newly-created Vice-Captain’s team, reflecting our fruitful recruitment efforts. Congratulations go to the Captain’s team for winning by a significant margin of 51 points, as well as the top scorer of the day, Amy, who beat Joe by a single V.
As the winds picked up over the course of the week, we spent our last day of TR on Friday letting the novices have a go at self-coached shooting or taking a seat in the coaching chair at 500 yards. Saying goodbye to Century, we returned to the 900x points in the afternoon, where the strong winds served as a test of our seniors’ wind reading skills.
On Saturday and Sunday, we switched gears to match rifle. Keeping up our track record from last year, about half of our members shot the proper way after some strong encouragement from our Captain. Despite shooting 200 grain bullets at 900x, the fishtailing wind conditions still proved to be tricky (or “fun”, as Ashley puts it).
All considered, this Easter Bisley was a successful one, with the novices now acquainted with the basics of fullbore shooting, and our seniors now having recalled how to put a bullet through the middle. We were certainly blessed with good weather, with no significant rain and the weather at times even being pleasantly warm. With such talent in the club, we are looking forward to building a strong, Oxf*rd-beating squad over the next few months in the run up to the Imperial.
Many thanks must go to our alumni and friends who helped out with their insightful talks and skillful coaching over the course of the week, including Chris Haley, Jacob Mallabone, Emily Wackan, Adam Leech, Ashley Abrahams, Rosanne Furniss, Alice Good GM, Alex Harrison, Nick Tremlett and Chris Law.
(Photo credit: Firas Aleem, Juntao Huang, Bruno Iwanczyk, Ho Lam Yiu)
