CTV News: 50-year-old island archery club displaced by new HandyDART depot
After occupying a piece of land in View Royal for 11 years, the decades-old Victoria Bowmen Archery Club is being forced to leave to make room for a BC Transit bus depot.
More than 50 club members hone their skills at the archery range, located in a field in the 2400-block of West Burnside Road, weekly. Now, the club has been told it must pack up its targets and vacate the site by Aug. 30.
“It’s just heartbreaking. This is our home, this is where we reside,” said Victoria Bowmen Archery Club president Al Wills.
“With this we lose our home, we lose our identity.”
The club was granted permission to use the space by the now defunct Provincial Capital Commission (PCC) in 2009. Since 2010, the club has spent more than $50,000 transforming the surplus land into an archery range that meets the Olympic specifications of 60 metre target distances.
“A lot of the national tournaments are 60 metres so without having a facility like this to shoot at I can’t practice,” said Team BC senior women’s archer Lisa Lange.
“When this is gone, I’m losing part of me because this is my little oasis, this is my zen,” she said.