Update

Hi all,

well it's been a while. I've had a long spring and summer season working and haven't seemed to have had a lot of time for fencing stuff. By comparison, the slinging training and progress has proceeded apace, something at least that I'm very happy about.

Some reasons for this? Well, lack of visible progress in swording for a pretty long time. Too long just doing the same old stuff, very little sparring or freeplay and the constant changing of drills and interpretations from Helsinki have taken their toll on my enthusiasm for this hobby. I pretty much stopped going to seminars in Helsinki also because I feel like I'm so far behind, I'll just be mentally and physically swamped. It seemed just easier not to go.

Ok, this is silly. After another summer of practically no sword training, I went to the first session last week and had a blast. It was really fun! Now I'm signed up for a day of Fiore in October and Swordfish 2011is just around the corner. I also took the plunge and got a couple of nylon swords from the Rawlings Range. These are the basic models. Luckily a local company Rauttaportti http://www.rautaportti.fi/  has them in stock. I could have got the pro-line swords but I figured the cheaper ones were ok as a starting point. We tried them out at the club and most reckoned they were too light and a bit floppy. Still for the beginners they will feel more like a sword than the wooden wasters the club has currently. Let's see what kind of feedback we get with continued use.

I've become a sling factory since my last post. I don't have photos of the newer slings but I managed to get some nice leather offcuts at the viking festival and I've been making quite nice looking models since. It's a lot of fun and quite therapeutic to sit in the evening and make them. My accuracy has also improved a lot since the last post. I'm shooting a lot with the Balearic style and a sidearm release. However, I'm still using Greek, Byzantine and occasionally underhand also. I like doing the figure 8, but only for distance and for fun, accuracy and consistency are much harder with this cast.