Program:

Gunnebo Castle and Gardens
10.00 1st qualification round 24 targets
         marked or unmarked distances

Impression of the day:

Today the whole World Field Archery Championships Circus gave "acte de présence" at Gunnebo Castle and Gardens. And with 220 plus archers it is quite a spectacle. We were a bit confused about today's program, but we solved the cryptic "marked or unmarked" when the groups where assembled. The barebow archers shot marked today, whilst the recurve and compound archers have been shooting unmarked.

The surroundings at Gunnebo Castle are very nice to shoot. The organization has put up steel stairs in the course, wooden ladders and ropes at those parts that were tricky to walk. We put up an impression of all the targets and distances from course number 1, targets 1 to 24. And that is another interesting change here: in the next course, targets are numbered 25 to 48, and in the third course 49 to 72. That is quite useful in communication when someone is radioing for help at a specific target number.

Scoring is great here too, with regular updates on the event website. The only odd thing is that archers told us, they got sms messages with intermediate scores from the home front. I thought rule 9.3.11.1 very clearly prohibits archers from bringing electronic devices into the field.

Archers were surprised by the fact that the number of targets per face size was different from what they expected. The new rulebook says you don't need to do six of each size (bunny, fourface, 60 cm and 80 cm) but can mix them in any amount as you see well fit. And the local course builders used that. In one course archers faced eight 60 cm faces and were tricked because of it.

We feel sorry for Barry Hogan from Australia… he injured a ligament in his draw arm during a fall at the Swedish Open last week. He hoped in spite of the injury he could still shoot here in Göteborg. He did start the first elimination round, but could not finish competition because of his injury.

Lastly we had some problems with the fieldarcher.org webserver on Tuesday. The amount of hits and the stress we put up on it with statistics and photo-uploads crippled the server, but also other processes running on it. We moved the website to a new and faster server to deal with it, so our IP address changed late afternoon. And, dear audience, it does not really help if one tries to download the complete server… it is 25GB of data if you do. With the relocation to a dedicated new and faster server (with help from the HenZ guys in Holland) there were some loose ends with the videos and photo albums, and we ran a bit late with the daily report. We fixed the loose ends Wednesday morning, the daily report is ready, and we are uploading the last pictures from yesterday as I type this. It is time to check out how the archers are doing today.