Arizona State Midrange Championship April 16 & 17, 2011
OK…I’ll preface this with a disclaimer. I very, very rarely shoot midrange matches. If I want to shoot 300, 500 and 600 yards, I can do it at my home range. I have to drive 3.5 hours each way to shoot in Phoenix, which is the closest “proper” range to me, so I save my money and efforts for the long range matches.
I chose to shoot this match for one reason. I wanted to put my new INCH/Eliseo rifle through its paces in competition and see what I could do with it since the Creedmoor Cup coming is up in the middle of June. I was also looking for any “gremlins” that might be lurking.
Well, as I expected, the rifle acquitted itself very well. It held excellent vertical, on the order of ½ MOA all weekend, and performed flawlessly. It also drew a lot of attention being the only INCH/Eliseo rifle in this part of the country. This kept me busy answering questions and explaining the INCH action to curious folks.
Shooting the rifle in competition was an eye opener. Reloading from the shoulder was effortless and I attribute some of the excellent vertical dispersion to that, since all the shots were fired from 1 position instead of 17 different positions. The bolt operation stayed smooth throughout the 2 days. This had been a minor concern to me since the INCH action is a very close tolerance affair. Large amounts of dust blowing around during the match and pit changes proved to be a non-problem. In a word, this rifle is dead reliable.
So, on to match itself.
Steve Lockwood, a very talented local shooter, had the winds figured out pretty well. He jumped to an early lead and built on it for the duration of the match. I, on the other hand, had a very difficult time with the wind. It took me until the 300 yard line (we shoot 600, 500 then 300) on day one, to figure out the trouble. I was overcorrecting on everything and wasn’t seeing it. I just thought I was missing the wind values. Very frustrating!
Before shooting the 300 yard match on the first day, I took a wind reading with my trusty Dwyer wind meter….OK, 3-7 mph winds shifting back and forth from east to west regularly. Then I consulted the Shooter Ballistic program on my Droid X and was shocked to see that this wind was only good for less than 1 minute of wind in either direction. What???
No wonder I was over correcting!!! My brain was calculating hold offs for 1000 yard visual input. So I input different wind directions into the program and got a feel for what the real hold off values were for the prevailing conditions. Well, it worked and now my 9s were leakers instead of mid-ring or worse. I still had some troubles with the constantly switching and swirling wind but managed a 3rd place finish in a combined class of F-Open and F-T/R.
Note to self: There is a difference in mirage that says 2 minutes at 1k and 500!! J
I know…how did I ever miss that?? Well, as I said, I am a long range shooter and it never occurred to me to check the shorter yardage wind values. I usually fly by the seat of my pants, so to speak. As embarrassing as this is, I felt inclined to include the story in case someone else has made or might make the same mistake. It can be very frustrating to look at your scorecard and see scores that are lower at 500 and 600 than your average score at 1000!
This was the last match I’ll shoot before the Creedmoor Cup to be held at the newly refurbished Creedmoor range in County Offaly, Ireland. I will report on the match when I return.
Meanwhile I have a couple of ideas for blog posts between now and then.
Cheers!
Warren
Team USA F-T/R
