Before shooting commenced a somewhat over optimistic competitor suggested that “There will be a couple of 250’s today”.He obviously hadn’t studied the weather forecast – 14 mph winds with 30 mph gusts. And this was pretty much what we got for the duration of the competition. And the real fun part was that these winds were totally inconsistent, constantly switching in both strength and direction, literally by the second. The flags provided virtually no useful information as flags, by their very nature, can only ever provide ‘historical’ data, i.e. in the sort of conditions we endured today the wind had already changed (again) by the time the flags reacted.
Mike Foster’s first round score of 248 was the closest anyone got to a 250, and this outstanding card helped to propel him to the top of today’s leaderboard. But the top five scores all displayed that all-important consistency, for example, Alistair took second place with 243, 244, 243 – not particularly outstanding cards, but a good rock-solid performance in extremely challenging conditions.
Sixteen competitors, most of whom used almost all of the 20 minutes available, meant that we didn’t finish until 15.30.Our scorer averaged out the 16 scores for each of the three rounds – 9.00 – 11.00, 11.00 – 13.00, and 13.00 -15,00. Had anyone been asked to guess the differences most would have confidently said that the second and third cards would have been progressively worse that the first ones, as the wind did seem to strengthen considerably throughout the day. However, the statistics told a completely different story – the round one average was 240 while rounds two and three were both 239.
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