SFAA Bowhunter Championships 2025

By Edwin Jones

This year the SFAA Bowhunter Championships were hosted by Drum Field Archers in the Scottish Borders. This is a two day tournament with each day comprising of a single unit 2D animal round in the morning and a single unit 3D unmarked round in the afternoon.

For the 2D round, the animal is split into two scoring zones, kill and wound. The archer shoots up to three arrows but stops when their arrow scores (so ideally only shoots 14 arrows per unit, definitely a round for lazy archers 😃). The scores vary depending on which arrow you score with...

	Kill	Wound
1st arrow	20	18
2nd arrow	16	14
3rd arrow	12	10

For the 3D round, the animal is split into three scoring zones, kill (10 points), vital (8 points) and wound (5 points). There are two shooting positions for each target and the archer shoots one arrow from each starting with the longest distance. As the distances are unmarked you really need to be a good judge of distance to score well at this round.

Day One:

Thankfully the weather wasn't quite as bad as expected and the drizzle soon cleared away. It did however stay a little bit windy.

The 2D animal round was on the hilly part of the course with some challenging uphill and downhill shots. I was quite pleased with my performance, scoring 266/280 and only having to use my second arrow once 😃

The 3D unmarked round was on the flatter (but more open) part of the course. I am really not very good at guessing distances so happy that I only blanked one target. Finished with a score of 147/260 which I'm quite happy with. On the downside, I'm down 3 arrows, lost on consecutive targets 5, 6 & 7 on the 3D. Went back with the metal detector afterwards and managed to find one the hard way "SNAP" ☹

Day 2:

The weather was worse with strong winds and ninja showers all day. In the morning I was better on some targets and worse on others. Again, I only had to use my 2nd arrow once and finished on exactly the same score 266/280.

The afternoon was much better despite the weather. With more and higher scoring hits, I managed to improve on my day 1 score by 53 points, finishing on a score of 200/280. Crucially though, I came back with the same amount of arrows as I went out with 😃.

Final overall score was 879/1120 which earned me the gold medal and Scottish Champion 2025 in the AMFS-R category 🥇🏆

Thank you to everyone at Drum Field Archers for hosting a great competition. It was a very enjoyable weekend with great target companions.