Members of the Blue Lake Archers staged their 18th annual invitational tournament recently, hosting three separate events over Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The forecast of excessive temperatures for Saturday resulted in a modification of start time and rounds to ensure the archers avoided the worst of the heat.
Saturday’s outdoor event was the club’s official tournament and visiting archers took the opportunity to participate in indoor and clout archery to round out a full weekend of competition with the local club.
Archers attended from far and wide, with some participants representing various Adelaide clubs and another archer travelling from Victoria.
Adelaide Archery Club, Barossa Archery Club, Eden Field Archers, Greater Hamilton Archers and Great Southern Archers were all represented.
Archers in tournaments were divided into divisions based on equipment type, age and gender meaning a total of 13 divisions were contested.
There was no handicap scoring system used in the tournament, instead all scores were tallied off the bow.
The indoor archery event was held at the club’s venue at Malseed Park and was again offered as a Qualifying and Ranking Event (QRE) in which archers’ scores are counted toward state and national rankings and team selection at those levels.
The QRE indoor is a World Archery 18 metre event, the round is a 60 arrow event on 40cm target faces.
Longbows made a comeback this year, having been a rarer sight in the recent Blue Lake Archers tournaments.
Organisers said it was pleasing to see four longbowers on the line Friday night along with two barebow recurvers mixing with the compound bows.
On the Saturday the traditional four distance outdoor events were altered to three distance rounds to compensate for the temperature conditions.
Perth and Short Canberra rounds made their first ever appearance during the tournament weekend.
The Perth round is a 90 arrow event over 70, 60 and 50 metres, the Short Canberra is also 90 arrows but at 50, 40 and 30.
Regardless of the distance combination both rounds use the 122cm target face.
A 60cm face is used for the crossbow round and required 45 scored crossbow bolts.
All of the four basic archery equipment groups were represented on the day including traditional wooden longbows, Olympic style recurve bows, compound bows and a crossbow.
The earlier start timing of the event combined with only 90 arrows to complete, allowed the lunch break to commence after the competition.
Traditionally medals are presented at a presentation dinner on Saturday night but this year the medals were awarded after the lunch.
Medals were presented by Blue Lake Archers Club president Ian Harris for placings in all divisions for the outdoor event.
The post event presentation allowed time for visiting archers to take in some local sightseeing or find a cool place for the afternoon before attending an evening meal that was held at a local venue.
Returning to Corriedale Park on Sunday morning the triple-treat weekend wound up with a long-range clout archery round.
The archers were spread over several distances dependent on their age, gender and archery equipment.
The four distances of 180m, 165m, 145m and 125m each had between one to four archers.
Windy weather conditions on Sunday morning unfortunately did not dissipate but did not dampen the fun factor too much.
