What a way to close out a High Power season!
We had everything that a High Power Match could ask for. The weather was outstanding. The day dawned bright and just a bit frosty, but as the sun warmed the range, the frost vanished and the morning light on the targets contrasted with the fall colors to make a picture that looked like a fall postcard.
Then, there the helpers. We weren’t going to shoot until 9:00, but when I got to the range at 7:30 (yes, almost in the dark) there were people already setting up targets. Who could ask for a better crew to support a match?
Next, if you are going to have a match, you need shooters. How about the biggest crowd of the year; 25 shooters? We had Grand Seniors, we had Juniors, we had Service Rifles, Match Rifles and a contingent of Palma and F-Class Rifles in the match – just about every ingredient you could ask for a match.The match was a 3 x 20 300-yard prone match.
We set it up to be a casual fun match – shooters were assigned firing points and each group of shooters decided how they would fire the match. One group of shooters shot all 60 rounds at once and another shot the match 20 rounds at a time. If someone was waiting for a shooting position and one came open, we just swapped firing points and kept the match moving.
How well did it work? We started a little after 9:00 (there were some last minute oh-pooh’s in getting set up) and finished a three relay 3 x 20 match by 11:58! This was a great bunch of shooters who moved the match right along.
And, even after five seasons with the Silver Mountain Targets, we still manage to discover new things. The guys on target 5 made a new and mystifying discovery. If you made a sight correction, the point of impact moved the wrong way. Upward elevation corrections moved the point of impact down and right windage corrections moved it to the left. When we cleaned up targets at the end of the match, we discovered the exact combination of swapped cables on target 5 that made for backwards corrections! Maybe we need to send some folks back to kindergarten to learn their color words when they install targets. (We’re poking fun at ourselves – not fussing!)
We had three categories of shooting yesterday; Service Rifle, Match Rifle and Palma/F-Class rifles.
In the Palma/F-Class group, standings were:
First Joe Bakies 598-41X
Second Tom Bonner 596-34X
Third Lewis Levin 553-12X
Match Rifle settled out like this:
First Mark Walters 591-26X
Second Ron Dague 578-13X
Third Jim
Jackson 575-12X
And the Service Rifle shooters:
First Ashley Stevens 596-26X
Second Gary Mabis 591-14X
Third Mike King 590-20X
Fourth Marshall Rohrbach 571-16X (High Junior)
These were great scores and there were a lot of good scores for the day. One great story of the day is Miss Aria, our newest Junior shooter in her first match (another left-handed 12-year old girl). She swapped rifles this week and is shooting a full sized rifle that weighs as much as she does – well, almost – maybe. She started with a 153-2 for her first string. After a bit of a rest, her second string was a 173-0X and then she finished up with a third string of 189-4X. That was really good shooting Miss Aria!
It was a great day – we had fun and everyone enjoyed a great match; a most excellent way to close out a high power season. The only problem – what do we do to make high power shooting even better next year?
We start Winter Offhand on Saturday, November 9 at 9:00 AM, and follow up with a Junior Class and the Winter 40 shooters. Come out and join us!