Cowboy Blob's Saloon and Shootin Gallery

I'm not a real Cowboy, but I play one in the movies.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Thank Heavens for Cloud Cover

Boy, were we relieved that temperatures never reached the record 120-something broached yesterday in the Valley of the Sun. One-oh-five? Bah! Our mini-squad of three contained two USAF Survival School graduates, but also a pasty-white-skinned redheaded teenager (yep, stepchild, even) and an overweight, out-of-shape transplant to the Sonoran Desert (that would be moi).







We sallied forth coated with sunscreen and stayed well-hydrated. I'd loaded a six-pack of frozen water bottles into a mini-cooler and Jon brought a gallon jug of water, in addition to personal water bottles we all carried. Nomex gloves protected off-hands from hot-hot black guns and lead-blasted target steel. My pistol was uncomfortable to handle with a bare hand, but that wasn't even a distraction after the starting buzzer sounded.



Terry and the League Course-of-Fire Committee whipped up a low-round-count but entertaining practice match. With three guys sharing a wagon, and no one sharing a gun, we decided to shoot shotgun first and leave the rifles in the truck. Here's Stage One.






Stage Two had shotgun steel on the left, pistol cardboard on the right, and a Texas Star that could be engaged from either box with either weapon. I got the essential double popper hit necessary to clean all the steel with the shotgun.








Stage Three was rifle-only and young Piter cleaned my clock. O' course, he has young eyes and optics! I shot from the seated position, but missed some of the required headshots. Jon struggled with a feeding problem.











Stage Four gave me a chance to catch up with Piter. Two poppers to be dropped by pistol, then an array of cardboard at a variety of distances. In rifle/pistol, Piter and I finished with 23 (not 2!) seconds of each other.

Update: Piter just reminded me that results are posted and he had beaten both Jon and me in rifle. He beat Jon by 2 seconds. I pointed out to Optics Boy that my 98.75 second match time beat his 105.66 seconds. I was King of the PumpGunners (and even beat one auto guy)! Jon beat us both handily, but he was using a semi-auto shotgun, so duhhh. Actually, Piter did darned good, but barely got to break in his brand new .45.

3 Comments:

  • At 8:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Blob - The regular match pictures are great, it would help if you mentioned table-to-target distances. It's hard to tell from the pics.

     
  • At 8:19 PM, Blogger Cowboy Blob said…

    I'd have to walk them all off and write them down after the fact, unless they were classifiers (which we don't use on the practice matches); even for the ones I design I leave the distances to the course of fire guys (or the set-up guys) to determine, because the scale of the graphics is only approximate and I can't anticipate every little overlap. The far rifle targets (Stage Three) were 45 yards away, which we know only because Jon was curious and paced off the distance on the way to scoring them.

     
  • At 8:24 PM, Blogger Cowboy Blob said…

    Okay, the posted stage descriptions might have it listed, but I think these stages were a last-minute WAG, because it wasn't annotated on Stage Three (at least).

     

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