Saturday. August 13th continued our string of good luck days for high power matches. It was overcast most of the morning, about 55-degrees at 8:02 when we sent the first shot downrange. When we finished at 11:04, it was only 64-degrees, a very comfortable day for shooting. Our ranks of shooters were thinned out a bit; we had five of our regular shooters call in sick (either with WooHooFloo or recovering from it) and two shooters decided that they wanted to uphold the FWRR reputation at the 600-yard match at Atterbury . Even so we had eleven shooters on the line and we had a good match.
It was Jim Jackson’s day; he took first place for the match aggregate with a 770-22X and he dominated both prone stages, with a 399-16X across both prone stages. He dropped one point in the first prone rapid stage, cleaned the second prone rapid and then continued to clean prone slow with a 200-9X. Congratulations to Jim for a great match.
Second place went to Mark Walters with a 758-24X – third going to a guest from South Bend, Pete Yarbro with a 751-13X. (Pete is a guest, but not a stranger to us). Mia King took advantage of a massive two-magazine cross-fire to take top Junior with a 711-4X count to take the Top Junior place.
Marshall Rohrbach, one of our Juniors, won the Offhand Match with a 188-1X. Mark Walters took first for Sitting Rapid with 199-8X . And, Jim Jackson dominated Prone Rapid (199-7X) and Prone Slow (200-9X) to take first in both matches.
We had an issue with slow target response in all of the rapid fire stages and after I got home and looked at some of the information stored in our line servers, I was able to figure out why. I’ll try to be brief. I can look at valid and invalid shots in each target log. In the rapid fire stages there were many invalid shots logged in each string. Our targets operate on sound – and yesterday morning was a cool, humid morning. Sound carried well yesterday. Shots from adjoining targets were being logged, and the system had to decide if they were valid on-target shots or invalid shots. The system got overloaded and it took it some time for it to figure things out. No shots were lost, but the slow response caused confusion with some shooters.
To prevent this from happening in the future, I will not simultaneously shoot adjacent targets on rapid fire strings. We will shoot odd targets then even targets to prevent this from happening again. I apologize for any confusion that was caused – we’re still learning even after operating this long with the system. (Please, remind me of this in case I forget…).
Our next match will be on Thursday, August 18th – a regular practice night. This will be an NRA National Match Course (50-rounds) fired from the 100-yard firing line on the electronic targets. Just a caution, there may be a waterhole in front of the line, so bring bug spray for ‘skeeters. This is a “No Match Fee” free match, but if you want scores sent to the NRA, please bring $5 for NRA processing fees.
ONE MORE THING … Saturday, August 27th will be the Indiana State 300-Yard Championship at Wildcat Valley. It looks like we have a group of Juniors going down to shoot and it would be great to have a FWRR contingent there to take back 300-Yard Bragging Rights for 2022.