There's no way I can present all of the stories I have to tell before I pack it in for the night. I've been downloading files from my Digital Geek-cam and sorting through them for the past seven hours.
I could tell you about Darrell losing a shoe un-assing the boat on "Don't Rock The Boat", the guy who swept me with his AR this morning, Higbie dumping his SUV in the six-foot deep ditch on the other side of the North Road across from Bay 7. (I didn't get to see this, but his squad-mates told me about it and they "almost" put out a call on the Range Officer Radio Network so I could get a photo - but they didn't, which probably saved me from embarrassing a friend.)
Also, I could talk about the old buddys I saw, whom I haven't seen for months or years but they came out to just WATCH a by-Gawd honest-to-Pete Multigun match. This was much the same as I did, devoting my entire weekend to take pictures and talk to (and listen to) the 84 people who paid good money just so they could fight heat, insects, equipment malfunctions (theirs) and very FEW Range Equipment Malfunctions (the host club) for the honor and glory of saying they went there and did that.
I couldn't do that. Well, I could if I was willing/able to invest a ton of money and a slew of time to indulge myself in the masochism which is MultiGun competition.
(I could even tell you about the $37,000 Prize Table ... but I won't. Except that Chuck Anderson -- Columbia Cascade Section Competition Director -- performed his usual magic with the Vendor Community. Thank you, Vendors, for sponsoring an excellent match!)
I covered the 2006 USPSA MultiGun Nationals a year ago (less a week), and I was impressed then. The quality of this match was no less. And the quality of the people I talked to ... and didn't get to talk to ... is similarly impressive.
Awesome Al Austen showed up. He hasn't shot an IPSC pistol match for a year, but he came by to support his pal Higbie (he of the semi-drowned SUV). Dan Nelson, who has been out of the IPSC circuit for two years as he tried to build a new business, was there as a competitor. He admitted he couldn't remember which end of the gun pointed down-range, but he got through the weekend without insurmountable problems.
I filmed a lot of people, and by the 2nd day I began to feel self-conscious about it. It seemed that every time I turned the camera on, the shooters ended up fighting equipment problems. Chuck Anderson found that Remington shotgun shells were just a little bit off-spec, causing extraction problems. Bruce Gary (AD1) forgot that loading Siamese-Twin magazines in his AR caused feeding problems if they were fully loaded. Brian Berkley had problems with both his AR and his Shotgun when I filmed him. (Brian said: "I don't care, I volunteered to help run the match. The actual shooting is just a bonus, I'm not here to win. I just came out to shoot.")
Brian's attitude was representative of a lot of people there, who just wanted to shoot.
John Clark said he got half-way through a stage and discovered that the stock of his shotgun was coming loose! He just shoved the stock back against the action, held it tight with his shoulder, and kept on shooting. He got through the stage just fine, according to him.
You may notice some familiar names. Most of the folks who were instrumental in presenting this match actually shot the match. Exceptions, of course, were Match Director Mike McCarter and Range Master Tom Chambers.
Here's my impressions of the match:
Worst stage of the match:
The long-range rifle stage ("Field Of Dreams"). With a very small number of targets, competitors couldn't afford to leave a target hit. Rumor has it that some folks shot 200 rounds at five targets, just to avoid a zero score. Well, I probably heard that wrong, but it was certainly a choke point in the match.
I never got around to visiting that stage. Life is too short.
Best stage of the match:
The 'airplane' stage. All three guns, and if you planned to shoot it "pedal to the metal and hair of fire" you were just asking for trouble. It was hot, and after shooting a couple of magazines at the six rifle targets the sweat was rolling into your eyes. I watched a 'heavy metal' shooter (iron sights on a .308) finally throw up his hands after two magazines and throw off his earmuffs, and his hat, just so he could grab a towel and wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Maximum frustration, maximum challenge.
Most boring stage of the match:
Stage 1: "Shooting for Dummies". All pistol, nothing but. Start with a 40-pound dummy over your shoulder, shoot four targets, dump the dummy on a table and shoot the other dozen-or-so targets. Terver Ott dumped the dummy on the table and ... it slid off! He had to go back and lift it onto the table After the stage was over, he came BACK to the table and began pummelling the dummy! (Too bad I had turned the camera off, it was a sight to see.)
I chose this stage for 'most boring', because it was the only all-pistol stage and we see that all the time in regular USPSA matches. In the actual event, it wasn't a bad stage ... just not really 'MultiGun'. The most boring stages to watch (as compared to boring to shoot) were the all-shotgun stages. WAY too much time was spend reloading. I'll include a lot of shotgun video and usually leave in the reloading if only to illustrate the problems of reloading in Tactical and Limited Divisions.
Think there are no problems reloading shotguns in Open division? Think again. All those tubes hanging down along your leg can be problematic when you're trying to move around obstacles. SEE the "Don't Rock The Boat" stage, where Craig Outzen almost stumbles when trying to reload while exiting the boat.
Funniest stage of the match:
"Don't Rock The Boat" You had to shoot at plates with a shotgun while standing in a flat bottom boat which was sitting on a plywood platform. Every time you shot, the boat rocked. Darrell lost a shoe climbing out of the boat, but it didn't slow him down much. He finished the stage with one shoe off, one shoe on, diddle-diddle-dumpling My Son John.
(I actually got the video, which I'll show someday, but I didn't have the camera rolling when he went back after the stage and calmly retrieved his wayward shoe and returned it to the proper foot position.)
By the way, if you're looking at the stage designs at NASSONLINE.COM you'll notice that the stage numbers don't correspond to the stage numbers I cite here. That's because, when it came time to set up the stages, not all of them actually fit well in the designated bays. The match administrators compensated by fitting the physical limitations and didn't worry about the 'paper' version of the match. That's characteristic of the great Mac and Tom team. Whatever it takes to put on a good match.
Tomorrow, I'll start editing videos and will present them either here or on the Geek Video Shooting Gallery. In the meantime, I've selected 81 representative still photos and hosted them on the Gallery. You can look at them and maybe get a reasonable impression of what the range and the match looked like.
Stay tuned: film at 11.
It's now midnight, so that means ... more tomorrow. Maybe I'll even find the link to the Match Results!
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