another tidbit from the Colonial Wargaming list

[winterbadger]

Army Team makes history beating the Navy at their own game


A team of Army engineers from Wattisham airfield, near Ipswich, Suffolk, made history at HMS Collingwood on Saturday 18 June 2005 when they became the first non-Navy team ever to win the prestigious Royal Navy Field Gun Competition in its 98-year history.

The 18-man crew plus trainers from 7 Air Assault Battalion, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (7 Air Asslt Bn REME) was "euphoric" after outgunning its hosts and beating 17 other teams to win this prestigious Navy competition,

In a intense final, which saw the favourites from the earlier heats, Devonport Naval Base, finish last, the 7th Air Assault Battalion REME team romped home, with the Navy's Collingwood A team coming second.
They completed the final in one minute and twenty-two point three seconds taking the Brickwood Trophy, a solid silver reproduction of a 12-pound field gun and its crew of 7 sailors.

With typical inter-service rivalry, the Army team was particularly pleased to have achieved victory in the same year the Navy celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

I found a link to the article on the MOD website (http://news.mod.uk/news_headline_story.asp?newsItem_id=3318)

This is a grueling competition (link to website for competition: http://www.rnreference.mod.uk/03/field_gun/) in which a team pull a limber and field gun by hand back and forth, remove the wheels of the gun and limber and exchange them (while holding the gun up with no wheels!), fire the gun, move it again, exchange the wheels again, fire it again... I've seen it on film--it's incredible: tough, dangerous, exciting, incredibly demanding.

Comments

[blueinva.livejournal.com]

Wow! Just wow! The army beats the navy at the RN Field Gun run... I've seen it a couple of times in the flesh and lots of times on tv and I have to say it is one of the most exciting competitions to watch period - hauling huge chunks of a field gun over obstacles using a bloock, tackle and raw muscle is an awesome spectacle.

[winterbadger]

They've actually taken the obstacles off the course now. :-( "Due to safety reasons"; well, yeah, they make it unsafe, but rolling the dam' guns around and taking them apart is unsafe; part of the historic commemoration aspect (not to mention part of the challenge) is the obstacles. *sigh*

(Note that I'm not volunteering to go out and run the bloody course, obstacles or no :-)

[blueinva.livejournal.com]

*soft laugh* Oh yes, the 'finger check' part. Apparently the odd digit or two was known to have been lost. Shame about the obstacles though.