November Match One

Three Cactus Matches in November! I was tickled to cajole Jon at the last moment into shooting the First Sunday USPSA Match with me. Even better, results were posted the same night! With this kind of mojo working for me, I had a rare outing whereby I actually finished relatively high in the ranks of C Limited shooters. Although I had a Para-hiccup on the steel stage (damned Wolf ammo, left), I trailed only three C/L gunners and bested four of my class peers, plus one C Open and C Production competitor each!

Cactus erected five challenging stages, including a devious three-string classifier that demanded a fast transition to prone for the second string (right). Not planning ahead, I had to resort to my backup box of Wolf for the high round-count day. Even so, I shot pretty cleanly, only scoring one miss (and no no-shoots!) in the five pistol stages. I knew I had something special going on when I cleaned the Virginia-count-scored stage that had several long-range targets shielded by no-shoots.

All that mojo to my pistol hand had to come from somewhere; I placed 4th out of 5 carbine gunners, even with some unscheduled practice: the stage crew had neglected to tape targets after Jon whizzed through it (left), so I had to re-shoot it with the very last of the 55-grain Wolf I'd brought. I improved my time by almost 5 seconds, but dropped a round into hardcover and didn't make it up...I was a bit sloppier the second time through.

Placed third out of five shotgunners, though I'm amazed I did that well. Had to do some funny contortions to reload the 870 since I forgot to bring my left-hand Nomex glove. Good thing the camera staying the ammo box for that. Never mastered the feed from underneath method, darn it...I will not forget the glove again! Jon led the whole riotgun field with his smokin' Benelli.

Best of all is that there were 52 shooters for the day, including seven unclassified new shooters and another seven D-class novices taking advantage of the beautiful Phoenix sunshine to play the gun game. Jon and I were the only entrants to shoot all three disciplines, but we overheard a few of the newcomers voice their intentions to trot out their long guns next time after they saw how much fun we were having. If y'all think that was fun, come around 4th Sunday for the Practice Three Gun! Jon designed three of the four stages we submitted to the Course of Fire Committee...I can hardly wait!