Setting off from Bolton at 7.00am (maybe a tad early), we encountered very little traffic and consequently stopped off for a coffee break at the Little Chef at the end of the M56, before arriving in Connah’s Quay in plenty of time to hand in our 12 prints for the first round, reserve a row of chairs German-stylee and head off to the refectory at the Deeside College for a quick bacon and egg butty. Suitably refreshed, we took our places and waited for proceedings to begin. Rather unusually, we hadn’t a clue what to expect, but things soon became clear. With 36 teams submitting 12 prints each, the first round was never going to be a quick affair....but the quality of images shown was clearly very, very high - as one would expect at such a lofty event.

We started with some good scores..... 12’s and 13’s out of 15 with what were thought of  (by me anyway) as some of the “weaker” images in our team. After round 5, the only slight technical glitch in an otherwise superbly organised day brought about an early coffee break. Announcing the deviation from the planned schedule, the MC read out the current scores at that point and we were stunned to find ourselves in overall 5th place! I personally had my back slapped by many a person on the way to get a coffee and the congratulations bestowed on the club were very gratifying.....but ultimately proved to be the kiss of death! Once the proceedings had continued we suffered what can only be described in cricketing parlance as a “middle order collapse”. Based on the scoring prior to the break, we were taken completely by surprise as three of the supposedly strongest images in our 12 scored only 9 or 10 out of 15! Although we did recover with a strong finish, the middle order damage proved too severe to overcome and we slipped down the order to finish in mid-table after the first round, missing out on qualification for the final - which was contested by the top 9 teams from the first round.  

Nevertheless, we went into the Plate Final full of confidence with a fresh set of 5 images and scored 12, 11, 11 and 11 before our final image pulled out 14 points to give us a total of 59 and joint 6th place out of the 27 teams involved at that stage. Given the level at which we were competing, we left thinking that we’d punched well above our weight. We’ve got a year to put some muscle on for our next bout!!

Somewhat more disappointing was the fact that we left the competition, rather unusually, without a single raffle prize...and there were some belters on offer, including an Epson A3+ printer!!

Still....we gave a good account of ourselves in such exalted company, saw some absolutely excellent images and had a good day out. What more could we ask.