3-Gun - fun day, desultory performance
Shot 3-gun at Tacpro in Mingus, Texas, yesterday. I am not certain of the official temperature; my car thermometer was showing 114 deg. F by stage 4. Weatherman said the heat index was over 100. We had several near heat casualties and at the end of the day one of the Fort Worth SWATS in his 40's was pale and puking water. Stage 1 was pistol, I did use my 9mm S&W 659 and I thought it did at least as well as the .45, better in fact for shooting some of the targets you "run past". You were allowed to walk through the course but in spite of that I ran past one IPSC silhouette target. We had a couple of targets with the bad guy holding the hostage in front of him and you had to just shoot the bad guy; tricky precision shooting as hard as NRA bullseye. Stage 2 was "Coach gun boogie" shotgun surprise; you had to use their 12 ga. double barrel external hammer coach guns, and your birdshot to take down 12 steel targets as you ran down a trail. All I can say about that was that it was just a lot of WORK. And I was very SLOW. Ran past one target again (You will soon learn there is a theme here). Stage 3 was another shotgun surprise, this time with your real, modern shotgun. You started with 8 rds. (only) and again, ran down this trail.. . when you had to load you had to "take cover" by going down on one knee. Why is that so hard at 229 lbs. at age 61? The end of that, you had to take down two 8" steel gongs at 50 and 85 yards with slugs... I got both of mine in one shot, offhand (Good thing I had rezeroed the 1100 yesterday!). At last... Rifle. I usually shine there particularly in the long range stuff 200 yards or more. But yesterday, that was not to be. It was burp gun style shooting face-to-face. Stage 4 was rifle surprise, running down a "jungle" trail with paper IPSC targets and shooting them, missing hostages. At a "right turn" arrow, behind a bush, was an extra target, rather well hidden. Well I ran past THAT. At the end of the run was a "foreign weapon" - an AR very fancy but with only 4 rds. You had to rack it; I got a misfeed and had to reload. Shot offhand and got both 8" discs at 100 in 3 of my 4 shots. Stage 5 was pistol surprise... you went through a door and ran down a lane shooting pepper popper steels (kind of mini-humanoid steel silhouettes) Fortunately for me as a 9mm shooter they counted "Piiing!s" as hits; you did NOT have to knock them down. At the end of the trail was another Foreign weapon, Bill Davison's personal AR-10 Saber Defense clone with a VERY fine trigger. It too had 4 rds. in it. It took me all 4 to get my two "Diiing!'s" but I was a silly bugger and rested the rifle on a branch. The most successful shooters were the ones that unfolded the bipod on that one and shot from prone.
Lessons learned: Be well rested; stay well hydrated but do not OVER hydrate. If you need to urinate periodically you are well hydrated. You cannot roll back the clock but as an older shooter I clearly need to lose more weight to play this game even semi-successfully. At the end of the day I think even the young ones were pretty beat and I know us gray-to-white heads were pretty well "done." Still, a fun day; challenging as always and quite a kick. One point I like seeing was that there were two boys entered, 12-13 years old I would say, who did VERY well. Another top shooter won his rifle's lower as a Junior 2-3 years ago and is now "on the way up"!
Then there were the spiders. It's called the country, I guess....
