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We started the session attempting to ring up in peal followed by call changes with Stephanie, Duncan, Keith and Wendy taking turns to lead the band.

In between each touch of changes, the band rang Whitefield with Stephanie, Keith, Duncan and Wendy taking turns on the treble to practice plain hunting.

This evening we did a short session using Abel with Graham, Keith and Stephanie.

We started practicing plain hunting with Stephanie hunting on 7 and Keith on 5.

Then Graham rang a touch of Kent Treble Bob Major practicing treble bob hunting.

Stephanie and Keith then did some more practice plain hunting.

We started the evening a little light with only 4 of us (Graham, Wendy, Stephanie and Keith) as others were running late, so we began by attempting to ring up the front 4 bells in peal, followed by practising plain hunt on 4.

When Duncan and Vinni arrived, we rang up the 5th and 6th and did some kaleidoscope ringing include Mexican Wave in places and “Dodgy” Mexican Wave.

Finally we took turns with a practice method called “Whitefield” where the treble hunts, the 3 makes 3rd and 4th places, and the 5 and 6 cover.

At the end of the session we rang the 6 bells down in peal and moved to The Castle for a debrief.

Most of the band were unavailable this week, so a few of us met up for some practice on the simulator.

We started of with Keith and Stephanie practicing their leading on 6. We’ve previously done a fair bit of practice covering both with the simulator and with real ringers, so leading practice was a useful exercise.

Graham then rang a touch (3 leads) of Bristol Surprise Maximus.

The Keith and Stephanie had a few attempts at leading to Plain Bob Minor, to improve their hunting and listening skills.

We then tried ringing the 3 muffled bells (2,3 and 4) in rounds on 6 with Abel ringing the other 3 bells. This worked quite well, so we attempted to get Abel conducting some call changes. This didn’t work very well, primarily because we couldn’t hear the change announcements properly over the bells on the laptop speakers. We agreed we probably need to put some better speakers for this.

Then Graham had another attempt at Bristol Surprise Maximus followed by Keith and Stephanie trying out covering on 10 bells.

It was an interesting and useful practice session which ended, as usual, with a debrief at The Castle Inn across the road.