1600km. Each way!.

Anyway you look at it - that's a long drive. And when you calculate that those 35 hours or so of driving really only translate into a couple of minutes of shooting - you might think we should have our heads examined. And you may be right.

But - I enjoyed this match so much last year, as did the entire STI Euro Team, that we all decided together to attend again this year. And we were not disappointed.

Zoli and his teamwork hard to make this match worth the long drive, and they do succeed. 16 stages are offered here - and there is no thought to making the match easy for anyone. Nowadays, many match organizes try to keep the stages fairly simply - so that all who come can have a good time, and not get too frustrated with the difficulty of the shots. After all - you do want your participants to have a good time and come back the next year. So there is a trend of seeing easy stuff in many matches. When was the last time you shot a left hand stage in a level III match, or 50m targets?! It has been a while for most of us...

And while this year's MFS match did not have left hand or 50m shots, it did have plenty of difficult shots. Lots of very fast swingers, plenty of small plates, and more than a few mini poppers placed in front of Penalty targets.  One had to stay really sharp if you wanted to get through this one clean. I don't think anyone did, actually. I picked up one mike on a fast swinger (could have sworn it was there...) it was challenging!

It is always a pleasure to shoot with my fellow team members of the STI Euro team, and this time we were joined by DAA own Eli Huttner, a top level Open shooter in his own right. We had a really nice squad and we all thoroughly enjoyed the match, even when the weather turned bad on us on the last day and we had to shoot in the rain. This did not seem to slow things down too much, and the match still ended on time, with the last shots being fired about 2pm on Sunday.

I was victorious in Open, with my team member Juan Carlos winning Standard. A good showing for the STI team.

The organizers had a very original prize arrange for the winners: Custom made Dress-shoes! on hand was a famous award winning shoemaker, who measured us there and then for a pair of his expensive hand-made shoes. Very nice indeed. Many of the other shooters too took advantage of the special price being offered and ordered shoes as well. A novel idea indeed. Of course, there was an impressive table of trophies given out too. All in all, it was another very success MFS match, and one I will be happy to attend again. I just wish it was not so very far away.

Best regards,

Saul Kirsch.