The week following the Independence Day weekend was brutally hot, just the kind of weather where High Power shooters put on heavy coats and go out and lay in the sun with their rifles.  As the week went on, I had the feeling that even though there weren’t going to be National Matches at Camp Perry this year, the CMP had just sent us some Camp Perry weather to use at our local matches.

Relay 1 in the morning match

BUT – on Friday the oppressing heat and humidity broke and on Saturday morning for our CMP Home Range Appreciation Match we had a 69-degree morning.  For the morning match we had several cancellations and no-shows and we were able to shoot the morning session as a single relay match.  We had everyone there by 7:51 so we got started and were done by 9:40 – not bad for an 80-round match.

Three Distinguished Marksmen side-by-side in one relay!

The afternoon (really late morning) match started at 11:38 when the last two shooters came over from their earlier pistol match and we finished that session at 2:32.  The weather had warmed up a bit, but we had a nice breeze from the west that kept shooting conditions comfortable.  Thanks to everyone who came out and participated.

Joe Freiburger working hard

Mike King took high shooter of the day honors with a 781-20X in his afternoon session (he shot the morning match with a 780-26X, but he only gets to be the high shooter for the day one time).

 Jim Jackson had an excellent day as well, taking second place with a 770-27X including a clean 200-9X in Sitting Rapid at 200-yards.  Congratulations Jim! 

Geoff Branson closed out the top three this month with a 756-22X.

The Wailing Wall
Mike, we see the error in your PM Offhand score, but the total is correct

The match went very smoothly – in a large part because of the people working in places shooters never see.  Marty Didion and Chip Seidel gave some of the best Pit Management (aka Pit Sitting) that anyone could ask for.  As we went from the 200-yard line to the 300-yard line, those two guys had the target faces changed well before we ever got back to the 300-yard line.  We had a couple of uh-oh’s with the targets, but they resolved them in literally a couple of minutes and we never had a match interruption all day.

Mike and Glenna Grannis worked at the National Matches for many years and they are giving us NM class Stat Office support.  Glenna does registration and keeps me straight in regards to money. The money is always right!

Mike has discovered that if he sits on the porch of the new building, in the shade, his smart-phone will connect to the SMT Server, even when we are at the 200-yard line.  He can see what every shooter is doing, call up data from the server’s archives and he can enter scores into the scoring spreadsheet in almost real time.

Thank You to all of you folks who help with the “busy work” and let me pay attention to running the matches!

Our next match will be on the second Saturday of August; August 8th.  I will register it with the CMP as our second Home Range Appreciation Match – it is already an NRA Approved match.