2005 Croc Dundee Banzaii Ballistic Match

At last!

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting for months for the Croc Match.

If you're your familiar with the concept, this is an IPSC match featuring (this year) EIGHT stages with every stage requiring at least 50 rounds.

This year, the match was eight stages. Here's the line-up.

(NOTE: SWMBO spent the entire two days taking pictures. She took 692 photos, including the awards ceremony and a couple of dozen motion-picture videos. She got very tired of taking pictures and interviewing people, but this WILL result in a Front Sight article sometime in the intermediate future. We also have another half-gig of photos from Ron Downs, whose pix may be featured in the article or in future Blog entries. Unless you see the photo credit for Ron ... and thanx for sharing those photos, Ron .... all photo credit is SWMBO.)

Stage 1 (Bay 1) Eye of the Tiger

56 rounds, 25 IPSC, 2 USP, 2 plates ... 280 points. Course Designer: Paul Meier

Shoot 'em on the left, shoot 'em on the right, repeat.
Climb a ramp, shoot the eyes out of the tiger (8" steel plates), shoot the US Poppers (bounded by no-shoots) which activate two swingers.

Our squad (Squad 1) started on this stage on Day 1 of 2. It was a hoser stage, until you started shooting at the Eye of the Tiger. Then ... you had better slow down and get your hits, Bubba, 'cause the Tiger will eat you up if you miss!



This is Norm the Ungrateful, eying The Tiger back. He smoked the stage and bit the tiger's tail.

Stage 2 (Bay 2) Rock Around The Croc
56 rounds, 26 IPSC, 4 USP ... 280 points. Course Designer: Mike McCarter

Start holding a metal plate on top of head with both hands, drop the plate into the barrel and it starts two swinging targets. You pretty much HAD to start the stage from the downrange-most position possible, and work yourself back uprange engaging 8-round arrays on both sides of the bay as you went. As was the case with almost every stage, those who were limited to 10-round magazines immediately discovered that the best way to shoot the stage is . . . if you're moving, you had BETTER be reloading! Also as was the case with most stages, it's very difficult to fit this many targets into a single limited-sized bay without inadvertently building in "one-eighty traps". That is, between the need for awkward movement and the extreme angle of engagement, the competitor is required to be very aware of the '180 line'. As far as I know, of the 107 competitors at this (the biggest IPSC match in the PNW?), 7 of them were Match-Disqualified, and all of them for 'breaking the 180'.

Safety was the most important part of the match, of course, and the Range Officers (and the seven Squad Leaders) were specifically enjoined by Range Master Mike McCarter during the Shooter Meeting before the match started to "find for the competitor in questions of scoring, but all Safety Rules WILL be strictly enforced".


The shooter here is Gary Fish, RO is Jerry the Geek. ARO is Charley McAlister, and the observer in the foreground is Area 1 Director Bruce Gary. (More about him later.)


Stage 3 (Bay 3) Over Under Sideways Down

48 rounds, 24 IPSC... 240 points. Course Designer: Barney Brooks

Shoot 'em on the left, shoot 'em on the right,move forward to the window on the left, kneel down to shoot through the low barrel, far right to shoot through the OTHER window, throw yourself down into a prone position to shoot through the low port.

Here Rick Aragon (sporting his sporty Single Stack Match T-shirt) completes the stage under the watchful of RM and RO Mike McCarter.




Stage 4 (Jungle Run) Soda Shop Boogie

50 rounds, 25 IPSC... 250 points. Course Designer: Lorin & Sherri Orpwood

Shhhhh! It's a Surprise Stage!

But I can let you in on this much ...
Be vewy vewy quiet. We are hunting Cardboard.


Stage 5 (Bay 4) :The Doors"

62 rounds, 30 IPSC, 2PP ... 310 points. Course Designer: Marty Lee

Marty is such a quiet, unassuming and friendly guy. You would never guess that he has such a mean streak.
This is the highest round-count stage in the match, the most confusing, and features the most bizarre props.

When you hit the Pepper Poppers at the extreme left or right side of the back of the stage, it opens doors (window, actually) which allow you views of another 8-round array, and close off the view of the 9-round array you have just engaged.



The odd thing is, there's still plenty of room to engage the arrays whether the doors are 'open' or 'closed', because the doors (12" x 16" plywood panels) don't fill the windows (16" x 16" holes in the vision barrier". Why should you worry about the doors? Nobody knows, but almost EVERYBODY allowed themselves to be sucked into the mind-vortex of "following directions".

Me too!
I guess this was just one more example of the many ways in which the Croc Dundee cheerfully play with your mind.


As if that wasn't bad enough, it obfuscated the REAL challenge ... engaging three reclining targets behind barrels on the left side of the stage, which just SCREAMED for you to move&shoot fast.
Unfortunately, it was all too easy to break the 180 while screaming past this earlier barrel-hidden array. Of the 7 DQ's for 180 violations, three of them were in this exact spot!

Gotcha!

This was the last stage that Squad 1 shot on Saturday. I have to tell you, AD1 (Bruce Gary) was the RO when I shot the stage, and he came within a hairs breadth of DQing me for breaking the 180 on that barrel-array. In fact, he actually shouted "STOP!" . . . but I didn't hear him. After I broke for the back wall, he took a close second look at the array, my shooting position (clearly marked by the skid-marks in the gravel surface of the bay, I assume), and decided that although I had come very very close to breaking the 180, I actually engaged the targets within the mandated bounds of safety.

Well, I thought so at the time, but when somebody asked me "where were you when you shot at this target?" I couldn't honestly answer. I was so wrapped up in implementing the best solution to the shooting problem, I was running on auto-pilot and only ASSUMED that I was in a safe position to engage the targets.

It didn't make all THAT much of a difference, as far as my score for that stage was concerned: I had completely blown-by one of the targets, which earned me one procedural penalty and two misses. And I had got Alpha/Mike (or more often Charley/Mike) scores on four other targets, giving me a total of six mikes plus the procedural for a total of eighty points DOWN on a single stage . . . and I still was far from zeroing the stage. That's one good reason for loving a 310-point stage. It's really difficult to zero it unless you do very badly.

Bruce and I spent a lot of time discussing my shoddy performance on that stage, especially (a) whether I realized I was so close to breaking the 180 line (I didn't), and (b) whether he would have actually DQ'd me if I had stopped when he so commanded me to. We never got around to (c) whether I was DQ's even though I failed to stop, or should be DQ'd for not stopping when he gave the command (even though I didn't hear it) just on general principles.

This should be grist for a lot of future discussions, but for now I'm just grateful that I was ultimately judged 'legal' by sufficient margin to be allowed to continue competing on Day 2.

That's all the overview for the first day. Tomorrow, I'll describe the other three stages we so happily endured.

BTW: The match results are not yet available on-line. When they become available, I'll let you know here.