Shiloh Rifle Forums

The weather was very nice and attendance is growing. Two had to drop out because of medical.
Cliff and Mark do a very good job with this match. Well run.
Cliff Gregg made top honors Brent Danielson came in second despite a broken firing pin in his 77 Sharps and Mark Schuenke took third. Very good scores with the changing conditions. Saw a lot of miss markers on the boards.
I'm satisfied with my finals using a week old new rifle. I put 5 into the dirt and showered the guys in the pit for fat fingering a very soft let off that trigger had. I could not adjust it with the red locktite it was set with. But it shot well.

No grumbling and a nice bunch of shooters to shoot with. This makes for a good match.

Kurt

Kurt is absolutely right - it was a great match, great weather, great fun. Seemed like it should have been pretty much cherry picking for shooting conditions, especially on Sunday. It was warm, breezes were not too heavy. Sort of seemed steady. But when we got down into the spotting scopes, things got very tricky very fast. Take a look at those 800 yds scores. We shoot 800 last because of the way the lighting works on that range, and it makes it easier for some folks to see the targets late in the day. As a result, notice that there is only one 800 yds score on Sunday above 90. Jim Kluskens puzzled it out, and just barely. Normally, there would be 5-10 scores in the 90s and several in the high 90s. But not this weekend.

I shot 31 sighter shots on Sunday (only 27 sighters on Saturdays). Yet the match was only 30 shots for score. Why? Because conditions were changing fast and furious. And yet, we could never count on coming back to a condition we had seen before. Overall, scores were low and I do not believe even Cliff got away without dumping a record shot in the sand off the paper.

The flags sure didn't agree with the a mirages a lot of times.

It was actually my son, James (a.k.a. JK2), who got hold of the last puzzle piece, the vertical, and spotted me to a good score at 800 on Sunday. We were able to figure out the left/right reverses at 900 and I kept him within the 10-ring horizontally pretty much, but I struggled to keep him in the 7-ring vertically and even lost one just under paper. When we moved to 800 and he got in the scope while I laid behind the rifle he was able get a handle on the vertical as well. I had a 6 and a 7 early, in the first 3 shots giving up 6 points, then in the next 7 shots we only dropped 3 more points and the last 3 shots were Xs. Those 3 Xs doubled my X-count for the weekend just to give you an idea of how we struggled up until then. It was too little too late to help my score, but what a learning experience.

On Saturday small sight adjustments showed up big on the target causing us to be very reluctant to turn the knobs. Then on Sunday you almost couldn't crank enough in to over correct for windage! We had to be very aggressive with our windage corrections when dealing with the reversals. Saturday there were times when 1/2 minute was too much, on Sunday 6-7 minutes wasn't too much. Not big changes I know, but you wouldn't believe it would take that much looking at conditions. Sunday waiting for a condition to return was not an option, it would have been very difficult to get all record shots down range.

The guys that finished at the top had to work at it and my hat's off to them, well done! What a great match and a great group of shooters all!

See ya in June!

JK1