It has been a long dry spell, and I'm not talking about the weather.
We haven't been to an IPSC match since early November, and we, SWMBO and I, have missed the exercise, the camaraderie, and the smell of Gunsmoke.
ALBANY Saturday Classifier Match:
Unfortunately, SWMBO was feeling a little under the weather on Saturday (pun intended), so I had to go to the ARPC Classifier Match on Saturday by myself. I arrived at the range at 10am instead of the intended 8am, because I overslept.
When I got there, Mike "Mac" McCarter saw me pull in, and as he was just moving from Stage 6 to Bay 1 -- near the stats shack -- he invited me to join his squad, as they only had 7 people and all the other squads were 9 or more.
This turned out to be one of the few occasions when I wasn't squaded with The Usual Suspects -- the composition of which varies but is usually composed of a bunch of fat old men and SWMBO.
Mac runs the Junior Program in the Columbia Cascade Section, so I wasn't surprised to see that there were only four fat old men and three lean, energetic teen-age competitors in the squad.
The three juniors were Chris Cardoza, Chris Champ (whom I had not met before), and Andrew Jacobson (Mac's grandson). The 'fat old men' included Mac, John Matlock (president of ARPC), Mark McDonald (son of two other Junior shooters, who were not present today, and Jeff Cardoza (Chris' father). There were also two spectators named Larry and Skip. I never understood the relationship of Larry, but Skip was a preacher whom Mark knew personally and whom Mark had convinced to begins competing in IPSC. Skip was a charmer, and would have been competing this day except that his pistol was in the shop having some work done on it. I look forward to shooting with Skip on another date.
Because this was a Classifier Match, most of the stages weren't very interesting photographically, although they were technically challenging.
I started on SIX CHICKENS CM03-02. This is a 12-round Virginia-count standard exercise with a lot of no-shoot area showing between three 2-target arrays with not a lot of brown paper showing. To my surprise, I shot it without penalties. This built up a lot of confidence, which I later discovered was not justified by my current shooting abilities.
Stage 2 was another classifier, RAW DEAL CM99-33, another 12-round Virginia count classifier which served only to bolster my false confidence.
Stage 3 Crap Shoot was the first of two 'field courses' which was especially designed to allow the shooters to stay under cover against the rain. Actually, and surprisingly, we didn't get rained on during this match. But had it rained, ARPC was prepared to keep us as dry as possible. I appreciated that, even though I didn't score very high due to my conservative approach to the stage. Well, as I said, it has been over a month since I shot a match and I continued to shoot conservatively (read: slowly) until the end of the match, when I shot too fast and missed a target. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
Stage 4 was one of my favorite classifier stages MELODY LINE CM99-08. This allows the shooter to shoot quickly, as long as he or she has confidence and the ability to back up that confidence. I had shot the same stage at Albany in October of last year and got an A-level score. This year, I shot with the same confidence but without the same level of expertise, and missed the last target with the last shot. The Mike dropped me from a solid B-level score to a mediocre C-level score. Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.
Stage 5 was another field course, WHICH ONE NOW, in which both the shooter and the targets were mostly under cover. It required us to shoot the last two targets through a low port, and this caused a lot of problems for most of us. I managed to shoot a few videos of this stage, and this is the primary reason (apart from vanity) for writing this article.
I saw a couple of incidents which illustrated the reason why I so enjoy IPSC competition. Both of them illustrated the friendly environment which is typical of an IPSC match, and I posted the videos on the Jerrythegeek Shooting Gallery so I could share them with you.
In the first film, Andrew (Mac's grandson) does a fine job of addressing the field-course until he attempts to engage the last two targets, through a very low port under a bench. During this engagement, he moves his pistol too close to the 2x4 which supports the bench, and in fact the recoil drives the front sight of his Glock up into the soft wood, where it momentarily sticks. Of course, this causes a jam which costs him precious time. This is the reason why I usually warn new shooters to keep their pistol far behind the shooting port, a lesson which it took me ten years to learn myself. That is, when your pistol is too close to overhead cover such as a shooting port, the recoil often causes the pistol to impact on the material at the top of the port. This slows down the cycling of the slide resulting in some nasty jams. Andrew, unknowingly, provided and excellent example of this phenomenon, and I'm not sure he even yet realizes that he caused his own jam or how it happens. In fact, since we all know that we're not always aware of some of the things we do while shooting a stage, he might not realize it until he sees this video.
After Andrew finished the stage, his grandfather took him to take for his action. In fact, Andrew didn't realize he had hit the overhead so hard that the front sight momentarily stuck into the soft wood, but Grandfather Mac saw it immediately. In truth, I had to watch the video a couple of times before I saw it.
All ended well, as Mac pointed out the error and then clapped his grandson on the shoulder to show that it was all in jest.
If Robert Ruark had held off writing "The Old Man And The Boy" until this weekend, I feel certain that this incident would have been featured as an exemplar of how a grandfather serves a useful service in teaching his grandson how to handle firearms. In fact, if Mac reads this and reminds me, I'll not only loan my copy to him and to Andrew, but I'll also loan him the follow-up volume "The Old Man's Boy Grows Older". These are recommended reading for any man and boy who choose to learn not only how to shoot, but how to act.
After Andrew completed the stage, it was Mac's turn. Mac was careful to shoot the stage clean, and provided an excellent example in "how to act".
If that wasn't enough, the next shooter was Mark M. Mark had scoped out the stage carefully, and determined that if he reloaded between the first two ports he wouldn't have to reload while moving to the third port . . . the low port which cost Andrew so dearly in time.
but in the actual even, when Mark moved to the 3rd port he reloaded anyway . . . and he didn't need to. On the video, you can clearly hear mark say (as he reloaded the dropped magazine):
"I didn't need that, but I done it anyway!"
after he complete the stage, his memory was that he said "Darn!" Entirely not consistent with the actual verbiage, but it shows how we forget the details of how we shoot a stage, and only remember the gist of our thought process.
After this stage, the "Junior Squad" was done with the match and they moved on to other things.
I had yet to shoot stage six, TAKE YOUR CHOICE CM99-12, and I was fortunate that the previous squad hadn't cleared the stage yet. I prevailed upon the good humor of John B. to run me through the stage. I discovered that I must have been in a hurry because I managed to miss one of the targets, again with my last shot.
My experiences in this match taught me some valuable lessons, which I will promptly forget:
- when you haven't shot in competition for a while, you tend to shoot conservatively
- when you shoot conservatively, you tend (if you're an Open shooter) to adopt the rhythm of Limited shooters, and wait too long between shots when you should be striving for fast double-tap times
- conservative shooters also tend to think a lot while shooting. This is anathema to fast stage times. You must strive for a zen-like mindframe wherein you only want to shoot as your mind and your body know you can shoot quickly. You think slower than you shoot. Just walk though the stage often enough that you know what you must do, and when you must do it. Then . . . just do it. Don't think You can ruin your stage by over-thinking it.
Of course, it helps a lot if you get your hits.
Later: the Sunday Match, with a LOT more videos.
UPDATE:
Match results here.
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