Isle of Man Archery Club sent a team of five compounds to Church Stretton to take part in a two-day WA720 competition hosted by Long Mynd Archers last weekend.

Andrew Westmorland, Aalin George, Rhys Moore and Dave Moore joined UK resident Ethan Moore for a bit of pre–Island Games practice at the range near Shrewsbury.

Saturday’s action was a straight double 720 – two rounds with the cumulative score deciding the medals for day one and the seeding for the head-to-head knockouts of day two.

Shooting slightly uphill on an exposed field, the Isle of Man contingent acquitted themselves well, with Westmorland picking up gold in the 50+ category and Dave claiming silver just behind him.

Rhys snagged a silver in the gents compound, with Ethan finishing just off the podium in fourth. George picked up a bronze medal in the women’s division.

After fortifying themselves with an Indian meal and a quantity of cider on Saturday night, they headed into Sunday full of optimism. Sadly, things did not quite go as planned.

The scoring on Saturday had been done via dual electronic PDA and paper scorecards. The PDA’s malfunctioned several times and George reported that her score on the PDA was wrong but the paper scoresheet which she signed and handed in was correct.

Unfortunately for her it was the incorrect lower score from the PDA that was used to determine her seeding for the head-to heads.

Instead of receiving a bye that she was entitled to, George had to shoot and the mistake not being noticed until too late. She ended up in the bronze medal match, which she lost in a one-arrow shoot-off to come fourth.

Dave and Westmorland were both knocked out at the quarter-final stage. Ethan out shot higher-ranked opponents but was relegated to the bronze medal match by his younger brother Rhys and eventually finished fourth.

Rhys was on great form and led the gold medal match all the way to the last arrow with which he only needed to score a nine to win, but put it in the seven and lost by one point.

It was probably the most disappointing silver medal he has ever lifted but he had the consolation of recording two GMB scores to start his 2025 campaign.

Meanwhile at Greeba, the rest of the club enjoyed some splendid weather to shoot a variety of rounds on a day packed with incident.

Joy Gough had the misfortune upon pulling one of her arrows that it had buried itself in the head of an arrow that had been left in the boss from a previous shoot.

Later, an equipment failure caused her to shoot her release aid down the field. Fortunately, she was not hurt and the release aid only caused a minor chip to the paintwork of her riser, but the malfunction meant she had to retire.

More disaster struck late on the round when Les Corran, suffering a mysterious off, was aided by Pete Mumford in the search for his missing arrow.

It was finally located some way in front of the boss, but Mumford was so taken up with the search that he forgot to pull his own arrows and arrived on the shooting line to find that he only had his two spare arrows in his quiver which meant he had to record four misses.

A sad end to an otherwise good day.

BARBARA HARRIS