The DURC Report
5/3/01
Mark Dennehy

The past few months have been busy ones for DURC. We've seen the DURC
Open and the Colours, and also seen DURC take good placings in many of
the competitions of the past few months. We've also gotten a new
transport officer (who has unfortunatly not yet mastered the arcane art
of parking in RRPC's parking lot!) and so have been able to go to a few
more competitions than we'd expected. We tried to get a large party
together as a trial run for the last RRPC event and were more
successful than we thought we would be. Unfortunatly, the current foot
and mouth disease situation has curtailed future attempts at this.

In the Leinster open at RRPC, Ray Reilly took second place in both
class A and overall, with Mark Dennehy taking first place in class D,
followed by a quick decision to bump him up to class B (having
forgotten to do so for a few years!). 

The WAIDAM open proved disasterous for most of our shooter's averages,
since virtually noone had a good day, but fortunately the competitions
since then have been kinder. This didn't stop Alan Smyth from taking
first place in class C however. Hopefully once he finishes his final
year in college he'll take on a postgrad course and get back to some
serious training and make class B!

The DURC Open was a general success despite the dent in our pride from
having to host it at UCD's range. Bringing some high-tech computer
equipment in brought up the all-important "wow" factor and the catering
was generally well-received. We were hoping to demonstrate this
logistical talent again for the nationals, but this has since been
postponed. 

DURC also attended the RRPC turkey shoot, with admirable results,
taking home the makings of what was a tasty christmas dinner. Thanks
guys !

Wilkinstown's open wasn't terribly well attended by DURC as most of our
shooters were out of the county or the country on holidays with family,
but we managed to get one shooter there - even if he did manage to
promply amuse the others by not photocopying the page of the road
atlas that covered Navan, and locking himself out of his car on finally
getting to WTSC - with his rifle and equipment in the car. Needless to
say, this somewhat stressful sequence of events didn't help my score
much either!

Happily, the UCD open allowed me to make up for this somewhat
embarressing affair by letting me graduate to class B in Air Rifle. We
also managed to get more attendees, though perhaps not as many as we
would have liked.

The Rathdrum Open afforded us an excellent opportunity to start some of
our members off on competition shooting as RRPC and DURC shoot over the
same distance and under similar conditions. We managed to get 14
possible attendees, but this sadly fell to only 9 actual attendees.
However, good scores were entered by all, especially considering that
this was the first competition many had entered, and both Shane Kelly
and Mark Dennehy were able to claim prizes. 

The Fassaroe Air Open was our most recently attended open competition
and we fielded five entrants, some on only their first or second
competition. Liam Murray managed to place second in class D while Alan
Smyth again claimed first place in class C. 

Within DURC, work continues as normal - far too much for far too few !
The TTT patches have finally arrived and will be distributed as rapidly
as possible. Hopefully, given the notes taken from trying to get the
competition to run smoothly this year, we can run it in the coming year 
without the delays, hitches or other major problems we have been
plagued with this year. Work continues (albiet at a very slow pace due
to other committments like PhD research and classes) on the
computer-based booking system. The website has been experiencing severe
problems due to a computer hardware failure, which we are rectifying as
I type. We have a new webmaster, Conor McDermottroe, who will hopefully
take a great deal of pressure off of your author, who can then get on
with the programming for the online booking system. New jackets and
equipment have finally been ordered for some of our members (and I
still think that people had far too much fun taking other peoples
measurements!) so when the competition postponement ends, you can
expect to see some of our shooters showing up in new duds! (With
somewhat unusual color schemes as well). 

No new news has since come up regarding our new range, whose
construction is, somewhat predictably, running behind schedule. 

Finally, we have gained some new and highly promising shooters :
Deirdre Ninaber, Adrian Costigan (who managed to shoot 78, 93 and 95 as
his _first three cards ever shot_), Liam Murray, Peter Byrne and Conor
McDermottroe. We hope to see more of them over the next few weeks and
to have them win as many prizes as possible at their first competition
as soon as that proves possible. Until then, good shooting !