Winter Offhand – November 14, 2020

Saturday, November 14th marked the start of the 2020-2021 Winter Offhand season.  The day started out as a very frosty morning – about 22-degrees.  But, there was no wind and it was surprisingly comfortable to shoot.  I don’t think I heard a single “My fingers are freezing, or I can’t feel my nose” comment from the line.

At 8:00, it was a frosty 22-degrees; but with absolutely no wind. It looked a lot like Christmas.

We have a new software update for the electronic targets that is hoped to fix the “red target” issue we have been having, so we decided to shoot this first match on the electronic targets instead of the usual paper targets.

The new 100-yard range isn’t ready for traffic as yet, so we moved back to 200-yards – a change from the usual 100-yard match.  Our eight electronic targets would not handle the number of shooters we had for the match, so we decided to explore a feature of our system we had not used previously- pair firing. 

We had the usual start-up fluster of tablets, phones and IPads that wouldn’t connect, or stay connected – but we worked through those issues and got things under way.

Oops!

The Ranger Officers are still learning the system and we started off getting the order of fire wrong.  The Left shooter’s scores showed up on the Right shooter’s score column and vice versa.  Once we figured out what was going on, we told the shooters to just swap scores and life went on.

The firing line for the 200-yard Winter Offhand Match. There is still frost on the west side of the 200-yard firing point!

When we went to the second relay, we got the firing order correct and all went smoothly.  It was a learning experience for the Range Officers to figure out how the multiple shooter feature works and several of our shooters had never pair-fired before; kind of a win-win.  One shooter made the comment; “I liked that, it slowed me down and I shot at a better pace during the match.”

Thanks for all the folks who came out to shoot – and Thanks for helping us learn how to use the features of our Silver Mountain electronic target system.

Oh yes – the improved software looks very promising.  With the eight targets in operation for about four hours (32 total operating hours), we had only one brief “red target” incident – but it cleared itself with no intervention from us.  The system seemed to work well even in the cold conditions – something we had not verified for ourselves.

Our next match will be the second Saturday in December, December 12th.  We will shoot on paper targets from the 100-yard line under the porch.  We will start at 9:00 A.M. or whenever the first relay fills up the 12-target firing line.

Come on out and join us!