I participated in the Whidbey Island match at Holmes Harbor Rod and Gun Club on Saturday. The ferry ride, as usual, was pleasant. I wandered around a bit during the crossing and came upon these characters:

The two men in the foreground (Mike and Jeff) and the boy in the background ended up being in my squad at the match.

At first the weather was a bit chilly for the t-shirt I was wearing. It had been very hot the previous few days and I didn’t check the weather forecast. Within a half hour it warmed up to the point where it was quite nice and I didn’t suffer for lack of my preparation.

With my STI DVC back at the factory for repair I used my old Ruger P89 for Centerfire Iron sighted guns (CF-I) and my Ruger 22/45 for Rimfire Iron sighted guns (RF-I). The only holsters I had for the P89 were inside the waistband types and that made for a little slower draw than the competition holster with my STI. The double action first shot slowed things down some too. But, nearly 20 years ago, I had shot tens of thousands of rounds through my P89 and I had been practicing with in the last couple of weeks. The memory of how to shoot it fast seemed to come back and I did okay with it.

The stages were interesting. I forgot to take a picture of one of them with my cell phone and did a screen capture of the video from my video glasses

I have never seen a stage like the following one. The tiny plates in the center had to fall. You hit one of these for each string as the stop plate.

In this stage you shoot each of the two white plates twice, then shoot the stop plate.

Here are the results:

My average time per hit with RF-I it was 0.6024 seconds and with CF-I was 0.8934 seconds. At the last match I shot here my average time per hit with RF-I was 0.7203 seconds. With CF-I it was 0.8514 seconds.

I think it is telling that compared to last time my RF shooting was much faster but with CF my shooting was slower. The gun and holster made the difference.

I have never seen a malfunction of this type in a handgun before. Two 9mm cartridges became wedged in the middle of a Ruger P89 magazine:

From the bottom looking up.

From the top looking down.

Carry a spare magazine with you because this is a time consuming malfunction to clear.

The picture on the left is a new STI 2011 grip safety. The one on the right is the one out of my STI DVC Limited.

See a difference?

Yeah. The one on the right is missing some material. I don’t know if it came from the factory that way or it broke and I just now noticed. Part of the edge is very clean and part is ragged. It’s ambiguous from looking at it with the naked eye whether this is as intended or a failure of some sort.

I contacted STI via email and within minutes they said to return the gun and they would fix it.

Ry and I participated in the steel match at the Renton Fish and Game Club yesterday. We got rained on a little bit at the beginning of the first stage but it cleared up quickly.

Except for the first stage the courses of fire had small targets some distance away with fairly large transitions:

This, of course, slowed the shooting down. This was especially true for the younger kids in the match. Compare my times on the various stages to those of Joey Meboe, Isabelle Meboe, and Matthew Meisner. Look at how close we are on stage 1 and how different we are on the other stages.

But I still did well enough that I was happy with the results.

The entire match results are here. My average time per hit with Rimfire Pistol Iron sights (RFPI) was 0.7406 seconds:

With Iron Sighted Pistol (ISP) combined with Production (because they are very close in equipment) I won with an average time per hit of 0.911 seconds. I would have come in second place had I been competing against the people with open class guns:

Ry had an open class gun but no holster for it. When starting from the low ready with something other rim fire guns they add three seconds per string to your time. This was a huge penalty for him.

For me, the difference between starting from the low ready and from a holster is 0.6 seconds or less. So… Let’s assume a holster would have slowed him down 1.0 seconds per string. With 16 strings for the match, we should subtract 32 seconds from his time to get a better idea of what his capability is. This would put him at about 89 seconds for the match with a much more competitive time.

I participated in the Whidbey Island match at Holmes Harbor on Saturday.

The weather was good. The stages were good. The people were fun to hang out with. I had a really good time.

Double tap both white targets then hit the stop plate.

Here are the results:

My average time per hit with rim fire iron sights was 0.7203 seconds. With centerfire iron sights it was 0.8514 seconds. At the state championship the week before the average times were 0.5758 and 0.8003 seconds. The stage design makes a big difference. These stages generally had much larger transition distances.

Jeff Kanter was at both matches and Saturday he commented on how well prepared I was for the rain in Ephrata at the championship. I gave Barb all the credit.

I went to the range today and discovered the front sight on my Limited Division gun (STI DVC in .40 S&W) was slightly loose. At 10 yards it was shooting about 1.5 inches to the right.

Almost for certain was that way during the match on Saturday. It might of slightly increased the odds of a miss at the greater distances. But it probably didn’t make that much of a difference. Still, you want all the odds stacked in you favor for a major match and this time they were not.