As I said on Sunday I shot in three-gun match as well as the pistol match. I then said:

I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd.

I was partially wrong:

I had based my estimate on my time. I knew my hits (points) were good but I didn’t know they were that much better than everyone else.

I was a little annoyed that even though I had iron sights on everything I was put in open division simply because my shotgun had detachable magazines. Other people with scopes on their rifles were not in “Open”. I got the last laugh on that though. Adam had his rifle scope fail. It literally broke with internal components displaced and visible through the ocular lens. He was left with attempting to look under the scope along the barrel as best he could, seeing where his hits were, adjusting, and shooting again. He shot fast but had poor hits.

I shot a match at the Lewiston Pistol Club today for the first time in years. In my squad I shot far better than anyone else but that didn’t hold true when extended to the other two squads. I did place first in the Senior category and I came in 4th out of 22 overall:

I probably didn’t get high enough Hit Factor on the Classifier stage to push me back up into the solid B class but since I started shooting with this club back in the mid ‘90s I considered it a win for me if I came in ahead of Don Wood. I accomplished that goal today so I’m pleased.

There was also a three-gun match after the USPSA pistol match. I shot it in as well. I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd. Some of the other really good shooters had equipment problems. I had one failure to feed with my shotgun but other than that everything ran really well.

It was really nice to visit with people I hadn’t seen in years and catch up on things with everyone.

I should have taken pictures. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe because it was hot. I know that part of the time I was not feeling well. Drinking another half liter of water seemed to fix that problem so after that I drank a liter or so at each stage of the match. Did I say it was really hot?

I received an email today with a discount code (5% off) for certain gun safes. The code is “FatMarble4u” and is valid for the “Fatboy Jr.” safes in burgundy and grey marble at gunsafes.com.

The prices on their website include shipping, or as they put it, “free shipping”.

USPSA matches frequently have stages which can be shot many different ways. It’s a thinking game almost as much as a shooting game. What is the best way to shoot this stage? And the best way depends on the shooter. Can they easily make long distance shots? Can they run and stop quickly? Can they shoot better over or under obstacles?

One of my biases has always been to run to a set of targets and shoot them from close up rather than shoot from a distance. I consume time running but I can shoot a lot faster and get better hits when I am close to the targets. But there is a tradeoff. If there is only one target then almost always it is going to be better to take your time and make one or two carefully aimed shots rather than run 50 (or more!) feet to hit a full sized USPSA target. So how do you know when you should run and when you should just shoot?

I’ve always just sort of guessed and sometimes had dramatically great results. So much so that I have had better scores than Master class shooters and the shooters who followed me would shoot it “my way” rather than the way others had been shooting it before me.

But how can one know which is the better way, without shooting the stage both ways, rather than relying on intuition? I decided to do some tests. I reserved a bay at the local indoor gun range and placed a bunch of USPSA targets at the end of the range. I then moved back various distances and tried shooting the targets various ways.

In each test I shot carefully enough to get all A-zone hits.

At 15 yards I found I could run to about one yard away from the targets and then get a single shot on the first target in about 3.5 seconds. The second shot on a target required about 0.20 seconds. As I moved parallel to the target line the transition to each new target required 0.40 seconds. From 20 yards the run time was about 4.4 seconds with, of course, the same splits on the targets as I moved parallel to the target line.

From a low ready position at 15 yards it took me about 1.3 seconds for the first shot with splits of about 0.55 seconds regardless of whether it was the same or a different target. From 20 yards it was about the same acquisition time for the first target but with splits of about 0.95 seconds.

I also tried shooting at the same time I moved toward the targets. This took much longer than either of the other methods.

From this information I made a spreadsheet that allowed me to explore the decision as to run and shoot or just shoot. The results surprised me. I expected that at greater distances it would be require more targets to make it more worthwhile to just stand and shoot rather than just shoot. But that wasn’t the case.

At 15 yards I should run and shoot if there are five or more targets. Otherwise I should just stand and shoot. At 20 yards I should run and shoot if there are only three or more targets.

It turns out the time to run goes up linearly with the distance but the additional split time (compared to shooting from one yard away) goes up at a faster rate. I was going to extrapolate from these two data points to different ranges but with the split time varying in a non-linear fashion I need more data to be able to do a proper extrapolation.

On Monday evening I received an email saying the normal match was canceled. No reason given. On Tuesday morning I got another email saying “Change of plans…The Steel Match is back on for this Saturday the 25^th.”

It was a cool and cloudy day and sort of dreary but I have never been on a ferry ride that I didn’t like:

Chatting with people before the match I found out the reason for the cancellation was because the weather forecast was for rain. The reason for having the match anyway was because a couple people sent email saying they wanted to have the match anyway. It was sprinkling a little bit before the match. During the match only a few drops came down but we didn’t get wet.

We suspected the questionable weather was the reason for there being only eight people who showed up. With only eight people we just ran one squad and had more time to socialize during the match than usual.

The stages weren’t quite as interesting as they have been sometimes but there was a good variety. As is usual for this match they use a yellow stop plate:

In most of the pictures if you look closely enough (click on the picture for a higher resolution photo), you can see the tennis ball used for the aiming point for starting if you aren’t using a holster. No one uses a holster for rimfire guns and combined with the lower recoil the rimfire people turn in some really great times.

That last stage is very similar to the stage we called “Drag Race” at the March 28th match:

The stage yesterday was a little slower than back in March because of the position of the stop plate but I still did well on it. Some people were impressed with one string in particular which, IIRC, using my STI in .40 S&W, I completed in 2.93 seconds with 1.59 seconds used for the draw and first shot. I know it was below three seconds because Jeff said that was the time he wanted to beat. He came very close. He had one string of, IIRC, 3.08 seconds. And one of 3.15 which included a miss, and a makeup shot, on the stop plate. If he had not missed it would have been 2.75 seconds. Also of note is that all the other centerfire shooters were using 9mm which has a lower recoil but I do fine with the .40.

To me, even though I can repeatedly do it, it’s almost unbelievable to be able to draw and shoot five targets of that size, at that distance, in about three seconds. After consuming 1.5 seconds on the draw and first shot the split times between the other shots average a third of second.

Both my guns ran perfectly and although I had a few misses things went well.

The match results were as follows: