I'm super late at posting again and talking about a week ago now... A much more relaxed week last week, we actually had free time and we didnʼt really know what to do with it. One evening I actually went to sleep at 9.30 and it was magical. Still quite an intense week though; learning how to react quickly in an emergency situation, pretending that youʼre walking in the bush and getting charged by elephant or rhino is pretty hectic. 

Repetition is the name of the game. Practicing the drills and safety procedures over and over again is the best way to ensure that in the case of a real  incident, our training kicks in rather than panic. On Monday we had an intro lecture, then on Tuesd(y we focussed on safety, and loading and unloading. Well, everything is focussed on safety- the likelihood of being injured or killed by a wild animal is tiny compared to the risk of not handling a firearm safely. Just getting used to the heft of the .375 rifle is weird. It doesnʼt seem too heavy at first but just holding it at your side in your non-dominant hand (as you would be holding it while on a bush walk) but it gets tiring surprisingly quickly. Then factor in having to quickly bring it round to your front, cock the bolt to put a round in the chamber, bring it up to your shoulder and hold it steady to line up your sights on a target while getting into your firing stance… muscles end up aching where you didnʼt even know you had muscles! Then do this 20 more times to make sure youʼve got it down :)

Despite never having done any shooting or firearm handling before, it was actually relatively easy to get used to the motions. In a way it kind of helped that Iʼve never shot before as I didnʼt have any bad habits to correct and just learnt the safest techniques from the start. We quickly moved on to loading and unloading the rifle while blindfolded which seems like it would be hard but, again, the muscle memory develops pretty fast and we were all doing it with relative ease after only a few attempts. The next drill was to practice immediate action procedures, meaning what you would do if one of your cartridges failed to fire after you pulled the trigger. In essence this just means turning the rifle away from your face, ejecting the cartridge, continuing firing, then reloading. However there is the added stress that you have to pretend youʼre being charged by an angry animal and therefore have to do it fucking quickly! Again, just needs a load of practice to make sure the process is embedded in your head. 

The thing that I was worried about was whether Iʼd actually be able to hit the targets. Itʼs easy enough to learn the drills and practice loading and unloading, but all of that would mean not a lot if youʼre shit at shooting! Another factor to contend with was that I discovered that Iʼm “left eye dominant” meaning that my left eye is the one that looks directly at whatever Iʼm looking at, which in shooting would mean the target. The problem with being left eye dominant but right handed is that when you hold the gun up to your right shoulder, your right eye is the one that looks down the sights to line up to the target. But I keep wanting to shut my right eye and look with my left, which just doesnʼt work! The solutions are either to shoot left handed, which is possible but slightly more awkward, or to just deal with it and try and train my right eye to just be better at seeing things… I mean it literally has one job, is it too much to ask that it look at things properly! Itʼs kinda weird figuring out that you have one shit eye. Anyway, some people with the same problem decided to train as lefties, while I decided to try and make my eyes behave themselves. The only problem with this, is that I donʼt really know how well I shoot on each side, so I might put in a load of effort doing drills with my right hand, only to discover that I canʼt shoot for shit on my right eye, and have to retrain my muscle memory to shoot left handed. Luckily Trevor had a solution - a pellet gun! Turns out Iʼm just crap with both hands, so doesnʼt matter which I shoot with! Nah, I wasnʼt too bad, but luckily it showed that there was no obvious difference between my left and right, and my bad eye wasnʼt making me shoot 2 feet to the left or anything.

The next day we got to play with a slightly bigger gun. Trevor had rustled up some .22 ammunition so that we could shoot an actual rifle on the range and   

practice some of the drills we have to learn for the advanced rifle handling. The first drill is just shooting at a 12m target 3 times in your own time; the second one is shooting a 12m, an 8m and a 4m target one after the other in under 12 seconds or something. You get points for your shots and points for speed, but if you hit 3 bulls (10 points each) then you pass, as long as youʼre under the time limit,, so accuracy is more important than speed. And I was actually pretty good at it! Only one of my shots out of 12 didnʼt go in the target, and that was my first go at the 12-8-4 drill, where you inevitably panic a bit because you worry about the time limit. I feel so much more confident now, knowing that Iʼm not going to be completely shit at it. After weʼd all had a go with the .22, we had a go at firing the .375 - the minimum calibre of rifle that we would have to carry in the field, and fuck me it is so much louder and has so much more recoil! We obviously knew that it would be like that but itʼs crazy how much more power it has in practice. We didnʼt check points for that, but I at least got it in the target which Iʼm happy about! 

Our last 2 days of rifle handling were much more boring. We had to go to Tzaneen to do the official rifle handling competency certificate, to prove that we know the law about firearm handling and safe practice. The whole process includes 3 workbooks that weʼd completed earlier in the week, then 3 tests on the exact same things as are in the workbooks, plus firing 20 rounds on target from a .22 in the range. In all I swear the whole thing could have taken a morning, but instead itʼs spread over 2 days with a lot of hanging around in between! But at least we all passed :) The highlight was watching the worldʼs most boring video by the worldʼs most camera-awkward man where he talked us through all of the firearms laws that we had already learned, after we had already sat and passed all of the tests. But at least it was all done!  

The weekend was a relatively quiet one; night out on Saturday but not too mad, for some of us anyway! I nice long lie in on Sunday then some revision/preparation for Monday morning's rifle test and 4x4 week!