Sea Cadets Full Bore Rifle Course
A female cadet and I set out to travel to HMS Excellent in Portsmouth to go on a Sea Cadet full bore rifle course, which involved using the L98 Cadet GP Rifle which basically is a single shot version of the SA80, which is the rifle british forces are currently using. See picture.
The course itself consisted
of 5 days shooting and training which involved learning rifle drills, i.e.
stripping and cleaning the rifle then putting it
back together, what to do in case of stoppages, unloading and loading and
NSPs which are what you do to make sure there is no live rounds in the
chamber-so no one accidentally gets shot! The course in my opinion is the
best in the corps.
We stayed onboard the royal navy ship HMS Bristol, which is permanently docked in Portsmouth Harbor and is used by youth organisations nationwide. We ate with the junior rates in the dining areas, where as common as flies in summer we had a full english for breakfast! lovely! We at lunch on the ranges. When we were shooting we used the 25yard range at Tipner a few miles away from the base. The course was run by two SCC instructors, CPO (SCC) Sexton and Maj (SCC) Fleet.
The thing that made the week remarkable was that if you left a thing called a dustcover open (its a plastic cover which keeps dirt and muck out of the chamber) for every time you did that you had to buy a mars bar. I reached record levels. I had to buy 17 mars bars at the end of the course which we ate after finding out whether we passed and with which qualification.
It was a truly memorable week and everyone in the corps should do it at least once if not twice. It was in term time, which was really cool, my classmates were really jealous!
Jack Tyler February 2005