Last week on Tuesday 17 October, a small group of our senior CCF army cadets were offered the chance to get involved on a range day with the cadet training team at Chilcomb Military Range. Head of Outdoor Education, Mr Steve Macpherson, reports:
On arrival, the range was set up and we were soon ready to go. For many of our cadets, this would have been the first time they have shot the cadet rifle and certainly the first time that they were on a military range.
We started with some zeroing shots to adjust the sights for each cadet and then confirmed this with a grouping shoot. Everyone needed to have a grouping of under 55mm before they could progress onto the competition shoot.
Grouping and zeroing done, we then moved back to the 100m mark for the competition shoot. This included 40 shots at the target, with the winner being the cadet with the highest hits on target. There was a little bit of competition between the other schools present, however I think our boys were more focused on being the best Shiplake shot.
We weren’t expecting much as shooting has not factored very highly with our CCF for a while, however I was pleasantly surprised. Our top shot of the day was Harrison Walton with an impressive score of 29 out of a possible 40.
At the end, we had some spare ammunition so we had one final shoot which was all about your group size as opposed to how many times you could hit the target.
We did a little better in this with Harrison Walton coming 3rd, Charlie McLaughlin 4th, and Archie Heading coming 6th out of around 25 cadets present.
After that, it was the dreaded weapon cleaning, which as always takes much longer than it should but before long, we were cleared off the range and started on our journey back to Shiplake.
Well done boys and thank you to the cadet training team for running the range day.
