Years back I used to shoot handguns in competitive events. However the President of the international sponsoring organization refused to call it "competition". He elected to call it The Silhouette
GameThe first international slinging festival and
GAMES closed yesterday with our World Record Distance holder (Larry Bray) going down in screaming defeat in the Balearic competition to his wife who appeared to be having as much, if not more, fun at the "GAMES" than anyone. We ran out of time for all the planned events (siege casting, hang time and rapid fire were left uncompleted) but the Balearics were a hit (no pun intended) along with the Ply Penetrations and Jug Busting. Maximum Distance event seemed to suffer from the exertions of the day before at the golf course. Barbeques were superior thanks to Curious Aardvark's culinary skills. Friday night the dining canopy went airborne by the Wyoming wind with the six participants hanging onto it with all their might...
We did get it taken down before it got destroyed...
I also didn't have time to make up the water balloon slings so we'll have to post those results later.
Looking back over the last three days. I needed to be farther along with preparations but the FUN FACTOR of participants doing the events was extremely high.
Larry is thinking of hosting an event in 2008 in Utah... more on that later... maybe we could get the Arizona slingers up to that.
The significant thing is there are target stands, targets, backstop materials, protective barriers (with stancions), etc. that can be packed up and transported to wherever the next one is... within reason... lota steel in all this and I'm not sure leaving the continent would be wise due to tansport cost.
While we exposed oursleves to the world by shooting at fixed, structured and range graduated(including the golf) targets, again the empahsis was and always should be on the FUN of doing it and not just how well people scored.
We had NO participation by local youth... hunting seasons, football, tennis and other events out prioritized us it seems. C_A and I think working the golfing community into sling golf and maturing the development of the water balloon sling for potential young slingers can lead to regular participation in future slinging events by the locals. We are very lucky/blessed to have such a supportive and open minded local golf club and its members. There was a lot of very positive feedback during that activity.