Yesterday I went to Whidbey Island for a steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. It was a beautiful day to be on the island:
The match was run the same as Steel Challenge but none of the stages were the classifier stages.
The stages were the most interesting steel stages I have shot. In each of the pictures below you shoot the white plates in any order then shoot the yellow stop plate last.
You had to be careful on this one. It was undefined what happened if one of your shots hit both the yellow and white plate. Our squad gave the shooter credit for whichever plate gave him the best result.
One guy in our squad called this stage “Saw tooth”.
They called this stage “Train crossing”.
I don’t recall there being a name for this stage.
They called this stage “Drag race”. Obviously it was a very fast stage.
“Drag race” was the last stage our squad shot and I was “getting into the zone”. As per Steel Challenge rules we shot each stage five times and threw out the slowest time and summed the remaining four times. My cumulative time for the four best strings was 11.87 seconds (an average of 2.9675 seconds for the draw and five hits). One string was 2.83 seconds. When I finished a guy on our squad told me, “Fancy shooting!” I’m not sure “Fancy” was the appropriate term but I was very pleased with the results. Although I’m nearly certain there are a lot of shooters could do it in under two seconds.
The overall results are as follows. Most people shot more than one gun in different classes. The class definitions (IIRC) are:
RF-RI-O: Rim Fire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rim Fire Pistol Optics
CF-I: Center Fire Iron
CF-RV-O: Center Fire Revolver Optics
CF-RV: Center Fire Revolver
CF-LR: ??
Name | Class | Total Time |
Brian | RF-RI-O | 40.88 |
Dan | RF-RI-O | 51.58 |
Brian | RF-O | 53.89 |
Jeff | RF-RI-O | 55.26 |
Jeff | RF-O | 62.29 |
Mac | RF-O | 66.97 |
Jim | CF-RI-O | 68.13 |
Joe | CF-I | 78.15 |
Dan | CF-RV-O | 80.36 |
Jeff | CF-I | 87.68 |
Mac | CF-RV | 95.31 |
Bruce | CF-I | 97.78 |
Dennis | CF-LR | 111.99 |
Jim | CF-RV | 139.34 |
It wasn’t a big field of competitors in my class but I did win by a pretty wide margin.
Boy, the numbers in that group have fallen off a lot since the hullaballoo with Mike Gallion, who is the one that got that off the ground. He also founded http://www.internationalsteelshoot.com/contact/. I don’t completely understand all the details, but somehow he was forced out while recovering from some medical issues.
Our next match is April 11 in Ephrata. We had the biggest match ever for us last month, and that followed the biggest match up to date on Valentines day!
Come on over and shoot!
February Results: https://practiscore.com/results.php?uuid=7003F1B6-571C-459D-B3BC-7B267EAD3F1C&page=matchCombined
Great photos here! Glad to see ya’ll had such a great time. You should definitely post more matches like this! Maybe with a video so we can see the action. Thanks for sharing!
That bring back memories of working Steel Challenge at SWPL in the ’80’s.