A BLIND shooter, who learned her sport at Okehampton Smallbore Club, has just won the British Blind Airgun Shooting Championships — and set a new British record at the same time.
Carole Brown, 41, from Tiverton, joined the club because it is one of the few venues with specialised equipment necessary for visually-disabled people to shoot and in just a year she has made it to the top.
She beat off competition from the country's top visually impaired shooters to take the title at the National Airgun Championships in Aldersley, Cheshire.
Carole, who is almost blind and has a guide dog, progressed from shooting with Okehampton Smallbore Club to training at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford, where she was coached by among other people, a former British smallbore champion Harry Hancox.
The facility at Okehampton uses a specially adapted air rifle employing a system of varying pitches of sound which indicate to the blind shooter how near he or she is to the target. The pitch of the sound changes as the point of aim gets nearer the bull, so that the shooter can release the shot at the optimum time.
For the national championships Carole had to shoot 60 shots at 10 metres, a very gruelling course of fire which takes about one and a quarter hours to complete. Because of her average to date she was competing in Class B.
Previous to this meeting her personal best score on a 60 shot course had been 585 but at the national meeting she smashed it with a score of 593. Not only was this enough to beat everyone else in Class B, it was four points ahead of everyone in Class A and eight points better than the existing record.
As a result, Carole has now been selected to shoot for Great Britain in the Dutch Disabled Open Airgun Championships in Apeldoorn in Holland in the Spring.
Chairman of Okehampton Smallbore Club Bernard Rendle said he was delighted for Carole especially as she had only been shooting a year.
'We are not sure when she is coming back to Okehampton to shoot but we will be giving her a big welcome,' he said. 'This achievement is brilliant for the club and we hope it will raise the profile as we want more visually-impaired people to make use of the facilities here.
'Okehampton is one of only two clubs in the South West which has this specialist equipment.'
The Okehampton club was awarded a grant of £4,900 from Sport England at the end of 1999 to install the shooting equipment.
Anyone who has a visual disability who would like to have a go at air rifle shooting should call the club secretary Yvonne Rendle on 01837 52832 or club press officer Margaret Thomson on 01837 810805.