As I sit on my front steps at 6am on the day another wet and windy storm is about to cross the UK waiting for two of my fellow companions of this adventure, it occurred to me that this may not be the best weekend to try field archery on the French coast.
The event starts at lunchtime but one of our group (you know who you are) likes to be on the safe side and leave really early to make the channel train, as there may be lots of traffic, on the speed restricted M20. No traffic and forty five minutes later we are at the tunnel and getting an earlier train than the one booked. On the plus side the weather is not looking too bad (light rain) and we have time for a leisurely breakfast/brunch in France. We arrive in Quend a tiny seaside village and like all French villages I have visited over the years it seems completely deserted. Eventually finding a café that is open we struggle to get the car doors open and not get drenched or blown over in the rain and strong winds. The now heavy rain seems to be travelling horizontally. At this point all of us thought this trip was probably not the great idea we once thought it was.
Registration for Team Angleterre (Bruno, Claude, Stefan, Monique and Sally) is in a 1950’s small cinema. We were greeted with lots of smiles and being French hugs and cheek kissing (Ahh!! corona virus). The shoot is only about a five minute walk away but given the weather we drive. In the carpark, which is at the back of the beach, we get our gear on and go to the assembly point where they have set up the practice butts. The first arrow of the weekend gets broken here (Stefan) which sets up the tone for the day.
It is hard to discuss the course in detail because the weather was so bad that all we wanted was to finish and retire to the hotel for a hot bath, dry clothes and a drink or two. It seemed a very long course but that may have had something to do with our mood (miserable) and not the actual distance. A few arrows got broken the result of hitting the solid targets at the wrong angle due to the winds. Obviously not our poor shooting technique.
We were all saying if the weather remained the same we were not going to shoot on the Sunday but the morning greeted us with no rain and the sky even had patches of blue here and there. After a pleasant breakfast we register in the quaint cinema again and walk to the shoot. We are all hoping our poor scoring on Saturday will not be repeated again.
The course was the same as the previous day 24 targets all 3D’s. No targets had any obstacles between them and the peg and none over 30mts so initially we thought they would be relatively simple. How wrong we were.
The terrain, open sand or on the edge of a pine forest, gave the course layers many chances to mess with our brains, which they did very well. We shot two arrows from the same peg with 22 (inner kill got you 11) being the maximum score that could be achieved. Just hitting the target got you 5 points per arrow. Given you could achieve 240 points if both arrows just hitting each target, it is a measure of the difficulty of the course that the highest score in our group was only around 250. Thanks go to Bruno and Claude for keeping us within the rules as they are somewhat different to NFAS.
Although we thought we scored poorly three of the group got individual medals and we also won the team trophy which meant a photo with the Mayor for the local paper (they take their archery very seriously in France) which was a nice touch. The next shoot there is in November and I highly recommend it as a thoroughly enjoyable experience.