The field? Muddy. The scoresheets? Muddy. Everything else? Much the same. Yep, this was the Cleve Frostbite, SWWU’s last hurrah for 2023. And with the breeze on your face, plastic bags over your nice shoes and a judge in a green polo top and everything, it was a SWWU like no other. Frostbites present an interesting challenge as a halfway house between indoor and outdoor distances, and the practice ends were dominated by arrows whizzing high and plummeting low, to sink into the swamp that used to be the field at Cleve Archery Club. However, with sight marks, crawls and whatever the longbows do with rubber bands established, it was time to get scoring.
As we can reliably expect from SWWU at this point, there were battles to be had up and down the shooting line. Male Exp. Recurve was hotly contested, with Bristol’s Austin Zhan carrying the torch for the home squad and pipping Bath’s Louis Huygens by a single point. Female Exp. Recurve was dominated by Bristol’s Roisin Mooney, and with Magdalena Kazmierczak’s victory in female novice recurve and Bristol’s non-compound teams’ success, it was only Bath’s Allesandro Harker who denied Bristol a clean sweep of top recurve placings by taking 1st in the male novice recurve category. It was great to see barebows out in force at Cleve, proving that you don’t need an F1 car’s worth of carbon fibre attached to your bow to shoot decent scores. Joe Maskell brought home the bacon for Bath in the male category, and Marilyn Wong put her new Mykan riser through its paces to comfortably win the female category.
