As some of you may know, I will be commuting between Melbourne and South Africa for the next 12 – 18 months for work. I have taken the opportunity to bring a BR rifle and thought you may be interested to hear about my experience at matches.

I arrived in Johannesburg last Wednesday and after clearing customs, went to visit the police firearms licensing office which is in the main terminal complex. The airlines are supposed to bring your rifle to this office, but mine didn’t make it out of the airport, so a policeman and I had to go back inside the restricted section of the terminal to get it. You need to fill out a long form, but only 3 sections are completed by the applicant. The police want to see your Australian import and export permits and the firearm registration certificate. In SA, they license the individual firearms - the concept of a firearms license confuses them - so I didn’t bother showing them my Vic licence. Total time to get through all the paperwork was around 30 minutes. This sort of bureaucracy thing is always slow in SA – they had about 4 people in the office and I was their only customer. It is possible to get this permit in advance, but I have never done that as you need to apply at least a month in advance and I never have that leadtime. Plus, you would still need to go to the police office to pick up the rifle and permit and to show them the rifle, serial no, etc so you might save 15 mins max. This would most likely be a different situation with a whole team coming through at one time though.

I made contact with SA BR supremeo Roland Thompson and received invites to shoot at a number of matches. As it happens, the closest range to me is just outside Pretoria – the Krokodilspruit (Crocodile Creek) range that is host to WBC 10. They had a “league” match (roughly the equivalent of an Aussie club match, though they ran moving backers throughout) scheduled on Saturday, so I went along to shoot and check out the range.

The range is 30 benches and runs across a slope, with an incline from left to right. The drop gets fairly steep and the target frames are high – a combination that makes flag poles a bit of a challenge. On the left side, poles of about 2 feet are about right, but by the time you get halfway across the line you need about 4-5 feet and on the far right you need about 7 foot high poles. The range itself is covered with berms, somewhat like Silverdale. The benches are very solid, but the tops are painted and quite slippery. Conditions on the range were similar to Canberra, with a wind from behind, straight down the range, but often moving to green or red. The pick-ups and let-ups seemed to have a lot of push – more than the flags seemed to indicate. Also, the strength of the blow had a big impact on vertical. I shot the local powder of choice Somchem 335, considered to be the “South African Vitavury”. It seems to have a burning rate and density very similar to VV133, but just slightly slower. Vit loads were close to interchangeable with the limited testing I did during the match. The locals seemed to like shooting around 28.7gn, about half a grain less than I was using.

The hospitality of the locals was outstanding and they made me feel very welcome. If my work schedule allows it, I will go to another range next weekend for a two gun at the North-West Regional championships.