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Dundee Practical Shooters hosted a Club match this weekend, and for the first time in several months I not only attended, I participated.

[sigh]

Good weather (Winter in Oregon, but no rain and no wind), good stages, good people to shoot with. It don't get no better than this.

(click here to see the scores)

I looked very much like a guy who hasn't fired a round in practice or in competition for several months, and I didn't expect much more than a good time.

Going to a USPSA match when you're out of practice is like kissing an ugly girl; you don't expect much, and you're grateful for anything that exceeds your expectations, but mostly you just really, really want to get ... kissed.

I got kissed by the Ugly Ammo girl. I had a bunch of high primers. Out of the 150+/- rounds required in the match, I experienced misfires once on four of the six stages. I've been having problems with my Dillon XL650 for several months, which explains why I haven't shot many matches lately ... at least in part. The high-primer cartridges weren't obvious. I had gauged and inspected all of my ammunition and didn't catch those four. (Sorting through my ammunition box, I found another 'suspicious' round and dumped it into my range bag. I'll check that out 'later'.)

The match was better than my shooting. Evil Bill set up a six-pack of challenging stages which met the minimum requirements for 'rainy season' matches. There was a lot of steel, and in case of rain the targets could easily be replaced right out of stock without time-consuming painting. I talked to Evil Bill about this:

"I've changed my stage designs. If I want to restrict the shooter's access to the target area, I don't often paint it black. I just staple a no-shoot on top."

I saw a couple of black-painted targets during the match, but they were the exception, not the rule. This makes it much easier to replace targets during the match, because there are no concerns that the 'hard-cover' matches the original target.

Evil Bill made the maximum use of steel targets for this match. He had a Texas Star, a plate-rack (you'll see this later), and many Pepper Poppers and US Poppers to provide challenging stages without the need to replace a lot of cardboard targets (both Classic and Metric targets were featured).

The most interesting stage in the match was on Stage 1, Bay 1: "Get Over It".

Brief description: This was a symetrical stage, based on a six-plate plate rack. Vision barriers prevented full view of the plates from either side. You could only see six plate-rack targets, plus a single 9" plate, and 3 full-vision Metric targets from each of the two sides of the stage. Vision barriers forced the competitor to move from one extreme lateral side of the bay to the other in order to see/engage all of the targets. Eight plates and six Metric targets comprised the challenge and for the average shooter 20 seconds with no more than 3 or 4 points 'down' constituted a good run.

Here's how it looked for three Ol Pharts who were all shooting Open Division with varying degrees of success:



One of the things I appreciated about this match, which featured three "lateral design" field courses, was that the round count for most stages exceeded 20 rounds. This challenged the shooters using high-cap (over 20 rounds) magazines to decide when, where and whether they would reload.

The Hobo Brasser twice announced, at the end of these stages, "I should have listened to The Geek". I had advised to use 20-round magazines rather than 25+ round magazines, because that strategy would force the Open shooter to reload during the long run from one side of the bay to the other. The COFs were so challenging that only one or two misses would throw your round-count past your magazine capacity.

I admit, I made the same mistake on three stages, where I ran out of ammunition before finishing the stages (taking a miss rather than do a standing reload).

The thing about Old Pharts is that we know all the ways to screw up a stage, but we are beyond learning from our previous experience or the advice of our peers.

(Incidentally, Fish beat the crap out of Geek and The Hobo Brasser, because he took the time to make sure that he got first-shot hits on the plates. There's a lesson here, but I'm not quite sure what it is.)

And although there were a plethora of Old Pharts shooting Open Guns, one young man named Dante (attending with his father) was also shooting Open in this squad. He did a fine job, even though he forgot his holster and had to shoot from the "low ready" position. [This may be the wave of the future, but I hope not.}

Near the end of the match I approached Dante's father, Adam, and told him:
"I wish you had told us that your son was shooting without a holster because he didn't bring it with him. I thought you were teaching him USPSA shooting before you introduced him to holster work. I have a holster, magazine carriers and belt in my car that I would have been glad to loan him, if I had only known".

Adam replied: "That's okay. It will teach him a lesson. I think he will never go to a match without making sure that he has all of his gear".

(I never mentioned that in the past 25+ years I had forgotten almost every piece of equipment when attending a match, including pistol, holster, magazines and ammunition.)

"So, you are big on giving lessons, are you?" I replied.

"Yes".

"I'm glad you aren't my father" I said.

But this was not intended as criticism of Adam's parenting techniques. Actually, I think he has done The Right Thing. If my father had introduced me to Competitive Shooting instead of to shooting in general, I may have avoided a lot of embarrassing matches.

Here's how Dante looked at one of the match stages: