Blue Lake Archers’ annual invitational tournament held last weekend was the 17th staging of the event since its inception.
The club hosted three separate events across the city from January 14 to 16.
Saturday’s outdoor event was the club’s official tournament and visiting archers took the opportunity to participate in indoor and clout archery.
With COVID-19 restrictions impacting sporting and community activities, entry numbers were down again this year.
Despite the COVID-19 difficulties, the tournament weekend attracted archers representing various Adelaide clubs including Adelaide Archery and Barossa Archery clubs and Eden Field, Greater Hamilton and Great Southern Archers.
Archers in tournaments are sorted into divisions based on equipment type, age and gender, with a total of thirteen divisions represented.
The indoor archery event was run as a Qualifying and Ranking Event at Malseed Park, in which archers scores are counted towards state and national rankings with team selection at those levels.
The QRE indoor is a World Archery 18-metre event and the round took place as an 60 arrow event on 40cm target faces.
Local archer Ben Kilsby topped the scoring for the night with a 567 point effort in the open male compound division.
Young Adelaide Archery Club representative Annabelle Conboy Barossa Archery’s Tom Perry both recorded personal best scores at the Mount Gambier event.
A total of 18 archers took to the Corriedale Park archery range on the Saturday with entry numbers slightly up on last year’s COVID-19 skewed entry list.
The weather was mild for mid-January with the event kicking off to a calm start that was replaced by a mild tail wind as the day progressed.
Three of the four basic archery equipment groups were represented in the traditional wooden longbows, the Olympic style recurve bows and the high technology compound bows, while no crossbow entries were received in 2022.
A Sydney round was used at the local tournament in the way of a 120 arrow event over 70, 60, 50 and 40 metres on the 122cm target face for most of the divisions attending, with a Junior Sydney contest also held over 50, 40, 30 and 20 metres.
Blue Lake Archers’ Tamika Mullan, Ian Harris and Ben Kilsby were gold medal winners in their respective divisions and a silver medal was won by Paul Freeman to round out the local medallists.
Ben Kilsby again topped the highest score for the day, scoring a new personal best of 1153 points in the Open Male compound bow division.
Returning to Corriedale Park Sunday morning the triple treat weekend wound up with a long range Clout archery round with eleven archers competing.
The archers were spread over several distances dependant on division, with three archers at the 180 metre mark, while two shot from 165 metres, four from 145 metres and two setting their sights from 125 metres.
Perfect weather conditions during the set-up of the range Sunday morning took a turn as the day wore on, resulting in scores that were lower than the previous competition.
On Sunday the best score again went the way of Kilsby in the Open Male Compound division with the only new personal best credited to Tom Newton from the Adelaide Archery Club.
