The Washington State International Steel Shooting Association Championship match was yesterday. As I pointed out on Friday the match was scheduled to have more rain on that date than in the previous 32 years, for that date, combined. Okay. Since it has never rained in on that date in the last 32 years even 1/100 of an inch would have satisfied that criteria. But it wasn’t just a small fraction of an inch of rain and it was very unusual weather.

Bill W. (one of the Boomershoot Precision Rifle instructors since, essentially, forever) was one of the first people I said hi to when I arrived. After his greeting the first thing he said was, “Why does this remind me of Boomershoot?” My response, “I don’t know. Could it be the rain?” I’ve seen more rain at Boomershoot but in terms of an actual shooting match I don’t think I have ever seen so much rain.

Barb gets cold easy (her surface area to mass ratio asymptotically approaches infinity) and when we go on hikes she selects her clothes very carefully to avoid being cold. She tends to project her concerns onto me and for various occasions has given me clothing gifts to keep me warm and dry. I have rain pants and a rain coat with a liner which I took to the match. As near as I could tell, and another person commented on this as well, I was one of the best prepared people there. I was quite comfortable even when the water was running off my clothes in sheets:

The dark glasses were because those are my video glasses.

Because I was warm and dry as the rain picked up later in the match I ended up doing almost all the range officer work while the scorekeeper and shooters stayed under cover. The shooters would come out one at a time to shoot then go back under cover.

There were two people in our squad wearing shorts! Here is one of them:

On the way home my guns were out of their cases and drying out on the passenger side floor of my car and I dried the rest of my stuff out when I got home:

Here are pictures of the stages:

Stage 1: Change Of Pace.
Stage 2: Dot The Box
Stage 3: Mountaineer
Stage 4: Ouch

Stage 5: Pyramid

Stage 6: Stepped On

Stage 7: Texas Tree

Stage 8: Victory

My shooters point of view video:

It doesn’t show up in the video but when the rain was heavy there was a cloud of water ejected off the targets with each bullet impact. It made the hits much easier to see.

My guns ran perfectly this year [update].

Placement wise in the rimfire division I did essentially the same as I did last year but worse in limited division. In Rim Fire Pistol Iron (RFPI) I came in 9th out of 21 last year and 6^th out of 15 this year. In Limited I was 11^th out of 33 last year and 13th out 26^th this year.

If we also take into account the Senior category it was essentially identical to last year. In RFPI I was the only senior participant both last year and this year. In Limited I was 2nd (behind Pat Kelley) out of 7 last year and 2nd (behind Pat Kelley) out of 8 this year.

Looking at the individual stage results closely and comparing them to the stage designs I see where I did poorly compared to the competitors slightly above and below me. It turns out I did relatively poorly on stages 2 and especially 4. These are stage types that are difficult for me to practice at my usual range. Unless I have the training bay I can’t put up multiple large targets or targets with long transitions. That is what I’m going to concentrate on for a a while when I get access to the training bay.

I had the opportunity to watch Kolby Pavlock shoot a couple stages. While shooting rimfire pistol iron sights on stage 6, Stepped On his slowest time, which was thrown away, was 1.30 seconds. The complete time for his best four strings was 4.91 seconds. That is an average of 1.23 seconds to make five shots (less than 0.25 seconds per shot). My best time for this stage with the same gun type was 2.15 seconds. He was shooting, on average, in 57% of my best time. He also won the NSSF Rimfire Challenge World Championships last October at the age of 16. His YouTube channel is here.

After lunch his mother sat down across the table from me and chatted for quite a while. They live in Idaho and we talked about Idaho, kids, and shooting. One of the more interesting things she told me was that not many people at his school know about his shooting accomplishments. The school principal once asked her, “Do you let your kids play with guns?” She told her, “No. My kids don’t play with guns.” She told her quite a bit more as well but you can probably imagine the rest of the story.

The complete match results can be found here.

7:00 AM tomorrow morning sign in starts for the Washington State ISSA Championship in Ephrata. Shooting starts at 8:00. The match is expected to be completed by 6:00 PM.

For those of you unfamiliar with Washington State it has a lot of desert. Ephrata is part of the desert. Notice in the bottom right corner of the image below that the record rainfall for this date was 0.00 inches in 1984.

That’s right, in 32 years it has never had measurable precipitation on this date.

Now notice the chance of rain during the match is 100% for several hours. Elsewhere I saw a forecast of 0.25 inches of rain for tomorrow. The range is composed of sand.

Tomorrow could be “interesting”.

I just signed up for the Washington State ISSA steel championship 2016.

For those of you who might considering participating here are the details:

Match starts: June 18, 2016 @ 8:00 AM · Match ends: June 18, 2016 @ 6:00 PM

Location: Ephrata,WA,98848

The annual steel shoot is here! Come join us for 8 stages of steel targets that will be set in arrays that will entertain and challenge you. As in previous years this will be a trophy match with trophies through at least third in each category and division. Lunch will be catered in and is included in the match fee.
Shooters fees are $60 for the first gun and $20 for the second. Juniors (under 18) shoot for $30 for the first gun and $20 for the second.
Register early, we sold out last year!

General match, with the following divisions:
Ladies, Juniors, Senior(55-64), super senior(65+), defender

Price:

$60

Here is some video from last years event.

From here (via Say Uncle):

It should be obvious that choosing ammo carefully is important. But I hold the opinion that what we carry and shoot in a crisis has a lesser importance than how well we shoot it. In the final analysis, we are all pre-occupied with the wrong ammunition. We should be far more concerned about the ammo we did not fire in practice sessions that precede the day we have to shoot for real.

I am in full agreement. I have had no inclination to change my opinion since I first put up a web page on the topic in 1998.

I attended the Steel Challenge match at the Renton and Fish and Game Club today. I’m moderately satisfied.  I was first in Iron Sighted Pistol (ISP). But there were only three of us in that division. I came in 5th out of 13 in Rim Fire Pistol Iron (RFPI) sighted. I had two jams with the rim fire pistol. I called mulligan with one of them and got to shoot that string over. I was 12 seconds down from the next higher scoring shooter. The four shooters above me are all in the super squad of junior shooters who won nationals last year so I don’t feel bad getting beat by them. They are out of my league.

Compared to last month my ISP time went from 91.41 seconds to 78.37 seconds. I was shooting the reduced power Blue Bullets which almost for certain accounted for some of the improvement.

Comparing my RFPI time to last month I went from 64.47 seconds to 66.19 seconds. This difference is in the noise because we were shooting different courses of fire. These differences will easily account for the differences in time.

Steve, from work, showed up and watched the first stage we shot. He also took some great pictures of me. My favorite is this one:

Although there is one picture with brass in the air and another with the gun in recoil that are also pretty cool.

The results:

As a counter to the claim that old, fat, racist, white guys dominate the gun ownership ranks I found it interesting that of the seven guys on our squad only two were white guys. There were four people of Asian descent, and one Hispanic.

Saturday Barb, Max, and I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island. Just Max and I were shooting this time. This was the first time Max had ever shot in a match. I suspect Barb will try it sometime, but not yet.

The weather was better than last time but still not exactly warm. The ferry ride was pleasant with a nice view:

The weather was good enough that our friends Elizabeth, William, and Finn also came out to watch. William and Elizabeth have been telling me for months they were going to watch sometime and they finally made it. They live on the island only about a 10 or 15 minute drive from the gun club. It was Barb attending that made the difference. After the end of the match William shot Steve’s rifle on one stage just to see what an open class rifle is like. Then Elizabeth, William, and Finn checked out the rest of the range. The next day Elizabeth texted me:

We had fun yesterday! Actually considering a membership! Lol. Who knew?!?

Thanks again!

Ahhh yes… More people firmly on our side of the gun issue.

Here are Barb and Elizabeth (the quality sucks because it is a frame grab from my video glasses):

I have been having problems with the front sight on my STI DVC again (first time details). The plastic shim lasted several hundred rounds so then I got some “Liquid Metal” built up the base of the sight, sanded it down to where it was a tight fit, then used high strength, high temperature LockTite to hold it in place. That lasted for many months and many thousands of rounds. Then it fell off again last week. I tried just the LockTite. That lasted less than a hundred rounds. I then tried just the liquid metal, building up a layer on either side of the sight. That survived a couple hundred rounds at the practice range on Friday and survived the entirety of the Saturday match. Barb and I met some friends at the indoor range Saturday afternoon and the front sight slid way to the left on the first shot. At least it didn’t fail me while at the match.

Sunday I folded up aluminum foil, put it under the sight, such that it made for a tight fit and put LockTite between all the layers, on the base of the sight and on the sight groove. I haven’t taken it to the range for testing yet but will do that sometime this week. I want this problem permanently solved.

Two of the stages were very challenging and I lost a lot of time with my centerfire pistol on them. I did okay with rimfire despite having three failures to feed during the match.

The following stage is evil. You have to hit the white plate four times then hit the yellow plate once. If you miss the white plate and hit the yellow plate your shots stop counting for hits but they do count for time. Suppose your first shot is a miss on the white plate, hits the yellow plate then you continue to shoot the white plate four times, then the yellow plate for a total time of five seconds. You are scored for four misses with a penalty of three seconds per miss which gives you a time for that string of 5 + 12 => 17 seconds.

I had at least two strings with the centerfire gun and one rimfire gun string with penalties.

The stage below is not exactly easy either. The yellow swingers are for rimfire and the white swingers are for centerfire. The large yellow plate in the center is the stop plate. The two swingers must change side to count as a hit, and must be hit twice. The swingers are small and a centerfire swinger would sometimes change sides from the impact of the other plate changing sides. I lost a lot of time on the centerfire portion of this.

Here are the results:

RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights
PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights

Even with the problems my times were pretty good. The times represent 100 hits (five stages of four strings, with five hits per string). So the average time per hit with rimfire was 0.5922 S. With centerfire it was 0.9643 S. The last steel match I went to, March 13th, I had average hits times of 0.7675 S and 1.0882 S. On February 27th it was 0.6567 and 0.9233. And on February 14th it was 0.7125 S and 0.9271 S.

Of course the stages were different but I’m pretty sure my rimfire shooting is getting much better and I think the centerfire is better as long as I take enough time to get hits instead of something approximating “spray and pray”.

The forecast was for 100% chance of precipitation for every hour of the match at Renton today. Although the sun did break out for about 45 minutes of the hour from 12:00 to 1:00 the forecast was technically correct. They had canopies over the shooting areas, I wore a good hat, rain pants, and a waterproof coat so I stayed dry. But I didn’t wear warm enough clothes and I got rather chilled. And once I spent a few minutes in the car to warm up. Next time I’ll bring more clothing options.

I hadn’t practiced all this week and the first few stages I shot (my stage shooting order was 2, 3, 4, 1) demonstrated this.

Still, I had fun.

The Leprechaun

Lucky Charms

Renton Plate Rack

Saving Ammo

My guns worked well except for one failure to properly strip a round out of the magazine with my .22.

The complete results are here, but the divisions in which I participated are below.