O.o --Limbo-- o.O

The last two days were spent at Sembawang CC, participating in their archery competition.

There was some screw-up which I still don't know the nature of on the first day-- the day of the individual events-- which resulted in the events being pushed back *hours* after the time they were scheduled. My category, for example-- C Class Female. We were scheduled to start shooting at 12.45 pm, but we only really started our shoot at about 7-plus pm.

The Compound and Recurve Open categories, initially scheduled after C Class Female, had to be moved to early the next day before the team events, since we were only done shooting at about 9.30 pm.

Longest and latest-ending competition *ever*.

So all we did was sit around and play bridge for most of the day. I was a little unsettled about the sighting round-- there was no solid backing at the back of the range which would stop our arrows from going through the fence if we missed the boards, and I had good reason to be worried; I hadn't been able to make it for the sighting rounds on Friday sicne I had classes on during the time that the sighting was scheduled.

Plus, I wasn't too sure of my 50m sight; shooting in school on Thursday, I found to my horror that my sighting for 50m *seemed* to have moved down by one whole division, from 3.2 to 4.2. Something about that just didn't make sense or sit right with me.

Good thing that we were given two sighting ends before the scoring rounds.

For the first sighting end, I set my sight to 4.0, feeling very uneasy. I shot four arrows and would later retrieve only two-- three had missed the board and two of them were shattered-- such is the nature of carbon arrows. Which meant that of the seven arrows I had, I was reduced to five, and I needed six per end.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures, so I had to bring out the set of ACC that the club gave me for my 21st birthday and use them, despite the fact that they were untested and untuned. A "trial by fire", as Janice said. :)

I moved the sight up to 3.4 and shot four of the ACC, got a good sense of where my sight should be and then proceeded to start the scoring ends, feeling just a bit rattled by the whole thing.

But things went well; after a pretty good first two ends, I started to settle down and get back into the normal feel of things.

In the end, I achieved a score of 267 (out of 360), second after someone else's score of 291. But that someone was older than most of the other competitors, so it prompted Connor into grinning and asking later, "IVP first?" (First place for the institutional shoot, which is happening in about 3 weeks) Hm.. I'll try, Connor. Lol. :P

Even better was that there were only three teams in the C Class girls' category, and Kristy, Janice and I were the team that NUS fielded, and our combined individual scores placed us as the highest-ranking team! Which meant that we had a "by"; the second and third teams would shoot against each other, and we would take on whoever survived. :P

It was a good advantage, since we made use of the time during the "by" to confirm our sighting and we brought back the gold medal in the end. :)

And hey, it's my first team medal! :D

The Standard Class girls and guys did well too; gold for the girls' team and silver for the guys. But only because they lost out to a team of uncles who look like they've been shooting since we were in diapers. Jianhui and I were wondering what on earth they were doing in *Standard*, of all things.

So the medal haul for us is 14 medals (not including an appreciation plaque for loaning our boards to the organisers):
Standard Girls: 6th place and 5th place;
Standard Guys: 6th place;
Standard Girls' team: 1st place;
Standard Guys' team: 2nd place;
C-Class Girls: 5th place and 2nd place;
C-Class Girls' team: 1st place