Last week I received entries from five people for Boomershoot 2005. Heather and Ed are coming down from Alaska again–following a great circle route that is a 2040 mile journey!  And in the last three days I got email representing at least another four people saying they were or had sent in their entries.  Just counting the actual entries in hand I’m running ahead of any other Boomershoot ever at this time of year.  It’s a good thing we have added more shooting positions or we would be full by the end January or the first of February.  As it is my guess is that we will just have enough positions to accomodate people.

Speaking of travel distances to Boomershoot 2005.  Kim du Toit is planning on driving with Son&Heir the 1950 road miles (1400 great circle mile).  Stephanie Sailor came over 2100 great circle miles last year and I expect will be here again this year, although it’s possible she will have moved somewhat closer by then.  And I believe one of the people that says he is coming lives in central Florida which is about 2250 great circle miles. I don’t want to hear people whining about “It’s too far away.“ when they tell me they won’t be attending. Especially with the great airfares available now.

And as these pictures demonstrate, without Mrs. du Toit around this year I’ll probably have to have one of my range officiers watching Kim extra close this year.  Not for safety violations but with a camera so I can subsidize the payback of all the personal loans I made last year for the new explosives magazine with blackmail income.

Coming in second overall to Adam, who was shooting an open gun, was quite pleasing.  It was stage 3, which we shot last, where I lost the most points.  But even if I had shot it more in line with my potential I wouldn’t have caught up to Adam.  If Adam doesn’t make any mistakes, as he is often prone to, I can’t touch him in speed although I usually do better in accuracy than he does.  This time he was shooting an open gun which gives him about a 10 or 15% advantage right off the top and although there were lots of no-shoot targets available he didn’t hit any which is rather uncommon for him on stages like these.  He did make a couple mistakes however.  On stage 1 his time would have been at least one and a half seconds, if not two seconds faster had he not managed to insert an extra reload into it.  Notice that he already has the fastest time for that stage, 9.81 seconds.  He would have shot those 12 rounds, including one mandatory reload in right at eight seconds.  On stage 2 he forgot to “turn his television on” (his battery powered red-dot scope) which cost him probably two seconds but he still ended up with the best time.

Ry and I, with the help of a few spectators, tested four different mixes this afternoon.  One was a control, the same stuff we used at Boomershoot 2004.  We could only get one of six targets with the mix with the new fuel to go off with the .22 LR.  None of the old fuel without or without grit would detonate with the .22 LR.  However with the silica grit we did get smoke from all of them.  The coarse iron grit didn’t do anything interesting at all.  I still have a free source of very fine iron grit that I plan to test out sometime.  Everything detonated just fine, assuming I got a solid hit, with the .223.  Of course I was only about 10 to 15 yards away so the .223 was just a means of “disposal“.

As always, “More tests are needed.”

I think I did fairly well on the IPSC match. I did poorly on the last stage but it wasn’t exactly a catastrophe either. I expect I’ll be #2 or #3. There is a small chance of coming in #1.