Range Report #10

Was running a bit late this morning but managed to get up to the range just before 9am, bumping into another female shooter also running a bit late. We've shot together before and she's a really nice lady so we decided to shoot on the same squad again today.

There was three squads up on the board, with between 7 & 9 shooters in each squad. Adding the two of us to any of these squads would make them rather large (we try and keep the squads to 8). So we put ourselves down as another squad and promptly got told off! Apparently, it's not the "done thing". Regardless, we left our names where they were and in short order had 5 in our squad.

There were four stages and four squads so off we went to shoot.

The first stage we shot was a small one. There were 5 targets visible from the starting box and two hidden. I shot second last and the other shooters all shot two from the box and moved closer to get the others. I decided that I was going to see if I could hit all the targets shooting from the box (well, all except the hidden ones). I did :) ... mainly As, so I was pleased. (One of the targets had a no shoot on it, which I also missed!).

The second stage had 5 poppers (2 big & 3 small) and two paper targets. The two shooters before me shot left to right and had major problems will all the poppers especially the first one. I decided to shoot paper targets first then poppers right to left - the first four poppers went down with one shot each - the last took 3!!! (I swear it kept ducking!).

The third stage was a slightly longer shoot - 8 targets but only three were visible from the box and two were hiding behind a wall. Nothing special about the shoot - again mainly As but a couple of Cs snuck in there as well.

We had to wait for a long time for the last stage. When we finished our third one, a squad was shooting it another was waiting. So we went and sat in the shade (the range is an old quarry so not much shade around) and attempted to chat - inconsiderate people kept shooting around us.

The last stage was a 15 target one. Three of the targets were through portals (I'm still pretty nervous about these - but did okay). I had two jams with the gun on this stage - I'm pretty sure they were caused by me not putting the mags in far enough, so I think I need to do some practice during the week.

All in all it was a fun shoot - the squad was great, the gun behaved most of the time, my accuracy was good - but my times need a lot of work. To match the times of the "good" shooters in the squad I need to cut my times by about two-thirds.