(edit: These matches take place a few miles south of Luna, NM, in the Gila National Forest at 8600 feet above sea level).
We had our first match of the summer this past weekend, and it was a blast!
Me and Colben (my 7 year old son) arrived at the campsite around 830pm on Thurs. Bobby was about an hour behind us, and Franz arrived about 10 minutes after Bobby. Rex, Steve, Dan, and Barry were already there and set up for camping, Barry and Dan were actually already asleep, or at least too sleepy to roll out of bed. Colben and I saw quite a few elk on the highway near Alpine and Luna. Always makes it easy to stay awake, driving at night in elk country.
Between chatting it up and tinkering on airguns, it was around noon on Friday before we got to do much shooting. After a bit of zero confirmation and a quick lunch, we started to set the course. Rex thought it'd be fun to have most of the lanes on the north side of the forest service road, shooting north, which also happens to be a bit uphill. So, ten lanes were there, then we jumped to the south side of the road and lanes 11 and 12 shot mostly west, with lane 13 being primarily southwest. It was definitely a Rex course, with the average distance between each stake being 30 or 40 yards. Overall we had 13 lanes, 4 shots per lane for a possible score of 52. I say "possible" but a perfect score was more like IMpossible with how hard we set the course-more on that in a minute. It took us until about 4pm to get done with the course creation.
Colben and I ran back through the course to jot down distances and kill zone sizes (for Troyer calculations) while the rest of the gang got the silhoutte match set up. Larry P pulled in with the AOA van around this time.
Around 5pm the silhoutte match got underway. Rex's version of field target silhouettes has the following rules: sub 20fpe (so regular field target guns can be used), shoot from any field target position (bucket and sticks or shooting harness/bum bag, or even a tripod for the Unlimited class guys). 1 shot per target, 1 bank consisting of ram, turkey, pig, chicken, chicken at 4 different distances (40, 50, 60, and 70 yards). So 20 shots for each relay and we shoot through twice (40 shots). He had 3 sets made so three shooters can shoot in each relay. Six of us decided to join in the silhouette fun and here is how that shook out.
How bout Bobby shooting a perfect score! Good shooting Bobby. And yes, you read that right, a .177 Delta Wolf in the flesh, on this side of the pond. Bobby is an integral part of Daystate's ART testing team and I'd say the DW performed quite well in this setting.
Here's a pic of Bobby and the .177 Delta:
Barry also shot quite well, with only one miss, using his Red Wolf. He shot some of the targets out of order and the gang suggested letting that be the tie breaker between him and myself. I agreed of course.
Here's Franz and Steve during the silhouette match:
and an action shot of Steve (yeah he threw a jacket on, like most of us were doing around this time of day-it was cooling off nicely by this point):
Rex's TM1000 right before the silhouette match, with Larry P confirming his dope data in the background.
Saturday morning came around and Rex ran down the mountain to pick up Garrett and Charlie. Garrett flew his small plane into the Reserve, NM airport (landing strip) from Mesa, AZ and needed a lift up to the match site. We had a total of 12 field target shooters, and considering the remoteness combined with Mother's Day weekend, we were happy to have that many. Garret was our only WFTF shooter, and we had 3 in Open, 2 in Unlimited, and 6 in Hunter. I understand this was Charlie's first ever FT match.
Before I get into how everyone did, here are some of the more interesting pics of the course. These were taken Friday evening while Colben and I were getting the data for Troyer calculations so he's downrange in some of them. Most of the targets have KZ sizes written on their bases so he was yelling back the size and I was lasering the distances from the stake. I felt like we had a really interesting course, with shots between saplings, through crevices in rocks, up in trees, etc. Over, through, and under was the name of the game.
This frog.....
was through the middle of these two large oaks, back in the brush.
This quail.....
was under/in the triangle made by these trees.
A duck.
Frog on a log.
Rat on a stump
Right in the heart. 1/2 inch kill zone on this one, with about a 7/8inch gap between the saplings to shoot through. Target was a foot or two behind the saplings.
Some gators...
Snowy owl up close and zoomed out. I thought this one was neat. Just seems like a natural place for an owl to be hanging out, looking for a rodent meal.
Rabbit and a turkey
Snake in the bushes. Snake to the left of my little buddy.
Squirrel (and a Colben) up a tree. This one required a little rock ladder to be built to get up there high enough.
This pigeon was sitting on a couple waist-high boulders.
Scorpion was the near target on the same lane as the pigeon above. I personally thought that shooting through the crack in the rocks to hit a scorpion was super cool.
Left string going to scorpion's rock pile and right string going to pigeon's boulders.
Side-mount squirrel.....
from shooting stake.
Overall a very cool, and challenging, course. The near ones averaged out to a Troyer of 34, far ones averaged to a 38 for a overall course Troyer of 36. And that is without accounting for the pretty stiff and squirrelly wind's we dealt with during the match. There was definitely some grumbling, lol. Challenging = fun though, in my opinion. It was so tough that we actually had some illegal (per AAFTA) targets. The hardest was a Troyer of 50.7 and was a 3.4 inch kill zone at 38 yards. It didn't help that the brush was pretty open right there so the wind needed to be accounted for too. The scorpion in the rocks was the highest near Troyer and was a 3/8inch kz @ 17 yards, for a T of 45.3. With many of the targets being in dark shade, and some of the shooting lanes being in full sun, well, the difficulty that created in ranging them only made matters worse. For those that like perfect scores, this course would have been a tough pill to swallow. None of the shots were completely impossible, but there was enough challenging ones that holding everything together mentally and making 52 perfect shots would have been nearly superhuman.
Here is how everyone did.
Congrats to the high shooters. Congrats to Franz (second match I think I heard) and Charlie for doing so well with such little field target time under their belts. I was also impressed with my little buddy. For such a tough course, and being so young, I was pretty happy with how he did. I was even more impressed with how he didnt let the misses discourage him. Kept smiling and having fun throughout.
Oh. Tie between Larry and myself in Open class was broken by first miss. We counted longest run first, and we were both at 11 I believe. So then tie-breaker went to first miss. I missed my very first shot and I think Larry hit his first 5 or 6 in a row.
Much thanks to Rex and Steve for organizing the event. Thanks to just about everybody for help in setting up and tearing down the course. Also want to thank those of you who traveled to attend, it's a decent drive. We understand that it's pretty remote and try to design a course that is truly enjoyable to shoot as a reward for making the trip.
For those of you who missed it, we'll be putting on another one next month, second weekend, same format as above. Warm invite to come have fun with us is always in place.
Here are the GPS coordinates for anybody potentially interested: 33°43'27.9"N 108°58'16.7"W
We had our first match of the summer this past weekend, and it was a blast!
Me and Colben (my 7 year old son) arrived at the campsite around 830pm on Thurs. Bobby was about an hour behind us, and Franz arrived about 10 minutes after Bobby. Rex, Steve, Dan, and Barry were already there and set up for camping, Barry and Dan were actually already asleep, or at least too sleepy to roll out of bed. Colben and I saw quite a few elk on the highway near Alpine and Luna. Always makes it easy to stay awake, driving at night in elk country.
Between chatting it up and tinkering on airguns, it was around noon on Friday before we got to do much shooting. After a bit of zero confirmation and a quick lunch, we started to set the course. Rex thought it'd be fun to have most of the lanes on the north side of the forest service road, shooting north, which also happens to be a bit uphill. So, ten lanes were there, then we jumped to the south side of the road and lanes 11 and 12 shot mostly west, with lane 13 being primarily southwest. It was definitely a Rex course, with the average distance between each stake being 30 or 40 yards. Overall we had 13 lanes, 4 shots per lane for a possible score of 52. I say "possible" but a perfect score was more like IMpossible with how hard we set the course-more on that in a minute. It took us until about 4pm to get done with the course creation.
Colben and I ran back through the course to jot down distances and kill zone sizes (for Troyer calculations) while the rest of the gang got the silhoutte match set up. Larry P pulled in with the AOA van around this time.
Around 5pm the silhoutte match got underway. Rex's version of field target silhouettes has the following rules: sub 20fpe (so regular field target guns can be used), shoot from any field target position (bucket and sticks or shooting harness/bum bag, or even a tripod for the Unlimited class guys). 1 shot per target, 1 bank consisting of ram, turkey, pig, chicken, chicken at 4 different distances (40, 50, 60, and 70 yards). So 20 shots for each relay and we shoot through twice (40 shots). He had 3 sets made so three shooters can shoot in each relay. Six of us decided to join in the silhouette fun and here is how that shook out.
How bout Bobby shooting a perfect score! Good shooting Bobby. And yes, you read that right, a .177 Delta Wolf in the flesh, on this side of the pond. Bobby is an integral part of Daystate's ART testing team and I'd say the DW performed quite well in this setting.
Here's a pic of Bobby and the .177 Delta:
Barry also shot quite well, with only one miss, using his Red Wolf. He shot some of the targets out of order and the gang suggested letting that be the tie breaker between him and myself. I agreed of course.
Here's Franz and Steve during the silhouette match:
and an action shot of Steve (yeah he threw a jacket on, like most of us were doing around this time of day-it was cooling off nicely by this point):
Rex's TM1000 right before the silhouette match, with Larry P confirming his dope data in the background.
Saturday morning came around and Rex ran down the mountain to pick up Garrett and Charlie. Garrett flew his small plane into the Reserve, NM airport (landing strip) from Mesa, AZ and needed a lift up to the match site. We had a total of 12 field target shooters, and considering the remoteness combined with Mother's Day weekend, we were happy to have that many. Garret was our only WFTF shooter, and we had 3 in Open, 2 in Unlimited, and 6 in Hunter. I understand this was Charlie's first ever FT match.
Before I get into how everyone did, here are some of the more interesting pics of the course. These were taken Friday evening while Colben and I were getting the data for Troyer calculations so he's downrange in some of them. Most of the targets have KZ sizes written on their bases so he was yelling back the size and I was lasering the distances from the stake. I felt like we had a really interesting course, with shots between saplings, through crevices in rocks, up in trees, etc. Over, through, and under was the name of the game.
This frog.....
was through the middle of these two large oaks, back in the brush.
This quail.....
was under/in the triangle made by these trees.
A duck.
Frog on a log.
Rat on a stump
Right in the heart. 1/2 inch kill zone on this one, with about a 7/8inch gap between the saplings to shoot through. Target was a foot or two behind the saplings.
Some gators...
Snowy owl up close and zoomed out. I thought this one was neat. Just seems like a natural place for an owl to be hanging out, looking for a rodent meal.
Rabbit and a turkey
Snake in the bushes. Snake to the left of my little buddy.
Squirrel (and a Colben) up a tree. This one required a little rock ladder to be built to get up there high enough.
This pigeon was sitting on a couple waist-high boulders.
Scorpion was the near target on the same lane as the pigeon above. I personally thought that shooting through the crack in the rocks to hit a scorpion was super cool.
Left string going to scorpion's rock pile and right string going to pigeon's boulders.
Side-mount squirrel.....
from shooting stake.
Overall a very cool, and challenging, course. The near ones averaged out to a Troyer of 34, far ones averaged to a 38 for a overall course Troyer of 36. And that is without accounting for the pretty stiff and squirrelly wind's we dealt with during the match. There was definitely some grumbling, lol. Challenging = fun though, in my opinion. It was so tough that we actually had some illegal (per AAFTA) targets. The hardest was a Troyer of 50.7 and was a 3.4 inch kill zone at 38 yards. It didn't help that the brush was pretty open right there so the wind needed to be accounted for too. The scorpion in the rocks was the highest near Troyer and was a 3/8inch kz @ 17 yards, for a T of 45.3. With many of the targets being in dark shade, and some of the shooting lanes being in full sun, well, the difficulty that created in ranging them only made matters worse. For those that like perfect scores, this course would have been a tough pill to swallow. None of the shots were completely impossible, but there was enough challenging ones that holding everything together mentally and making 52 perfect shots would have been nearly superhuman.
Here is how everyone did.
Congrats to the high shooters. Congrats to Franz (second match I think I heard) and Charlie for doing so well with such little field target time under their belts. I was also impressed with my little buddy. For such a tough course, and being so young, I was pretty happy with how he did. I was even more impressed with how he didnt let the misses discourage him. Kept smiling and having fun throughout.
Oh. Tie between Larry and myself in Open class was broken by first miss. We counted longest run first, and we were both at 11 I believe. So then tie-breaker went to first miss. I missed my very first shot and I think Larry hit his first 5 or 6 in a row.
Much thanks to Rex and Steve for organizing the event. Thanks to just about everybody for help in setting up and tearing down the course. Also want to thank those of you who traveled to attend, it's a decent drive. We understand that it's pretty remote and try to design a course that is truly enjoyable to shoot as a reward for making the trip.
For those of you who missed it, we'll be putting on another one next month, second weekend, same format as above. Warm invite to come have fun with us is always in place.
Here are the GPS coordinates for anybody potentially interested: 33°43'27.9"N 108°58'16.7"W
Thanks for helping me out Cole, good friend's are hard to come by!!
