BOOMERSHOOT 2016

I see from his blogspot that my long-distance blogger friend Kevin Bacon Baker (Smallest Minority. and I ALWAYS get his name wrong the first try) is on his way to the Boomershoot in Idaho.

.And he has experienced some problems in his travel, which make him a True BOOMERSHOOTER .. because if it was easy, anybody could do it.

I attended a couple of the early Boomershoots (with sometimes inconvenient consequences), and I agree with Robert Duval about the smell of Napalm in the Morning.  Except it's a little more ... emphatic .. when you hit a gallon jug of  impact-sensitive explosives and it results in an exceedingly satisfying fireball.

I went to both events with my friend "Bumstead", who was a Microsoft Teckie from Mulkiteo (sp) near Seattle.  He didn't have any rifles, so I brought my two best rifles.

CHOOSING THE RIFLE:
The first was a .25-06 built on a 1903A3 action by my father with a birds-eye maple stock, shooting 117 gr Nosler HPBT bullets (no photo available), and the second was a custom-made (from 'the ground up') .22-250 shooting 56gr HP bullets (see photo below).  



The .25-06 has a stock of Birdseye Maple and dark red furnishings, I don't know what wood he used for them..   IT was made for deer-hunting and jackrabbit-shooting. so it has a relatively short and slender barrel.   When shooting 'running jacks', you need to swing the barrel easily, and adjust to the speed of the target, so it mustn't be too heavy.  Oh, but it's deadly on running Mule Deer, and bouncing Prong Horn Antelope too!   That rifle fed me a lot of venison over the years.

But at ranges over 350 yards away, the 6x scope and light barrel just don't quite have the gravitas to spot and hit small targets.  (Although I later wished, if irrationally, that I had 117 grain bullets to shoot long-range through the .22-250.)

The .22-250 had a stock of Oregon Quilted Maple and Morrisonite diamond inserts (a green agate found only on the Morrison Ranch in Eastern Oregon), with fore-end and pistol-grip cap of California Redwood burl which he had kept for 10 years in his workshop.  I was honored that he decided to use that precious fine-grain wood to finish my ultimate Varmint gun.)

The Maple stock is a very dense wood, and it has a full roll-over cheekpiece and a huge palm-bulge in the pistol grip.  The forend is full size and flat on the bottom, because it's designed to be fired from some kind of rest.  A rounded forend can make a dent in sandbags, causing a slightly different rest from shot to shot; the flat fore-end just settles in and after 2 or 3 shots it doesn't change position at all.

I had asked him to leave the barrel blank un-turned, because I wanted as much weight and metal on the barrel as possible.  When we went varmint shooting, we would shoot as many as 200 rounds in a couple of hours, and I wanted to free-floating barrel to absorb heat with the minimum of warp.  The (crowned) barrel was left at 25-1/8" OAL. but he and my uncle (the machinist) decided to ignore my wants and turned it down to 5/8" at the end of a very smooth taper.   They thought the gun looked 'ugly' without a tapered barrel.  I just said thank you, and hid my disappointment; but they were right, it does look nicer with a tapered barrel.  The gun weighs in at about 15 pounds.

Both of these rifles had been custom made for me by my father, as birthday presents on my 21'st and my 26'th birthdays.  The man was a genius stock-maker and he loved Maple as much as I do.

USE THE RIGHT GUN:
AT THE BOOMER SHOOT, the '06 only had a 6x scope, so although the 117-gr bullet held up better at long ranges than the 55-gr bullet from the '250 with the nasty west-to-east crosswind across the draw,  I couldn't see the longer range (up to 650 yards) targets with the '06.

The ;250 was easily the more accurate rifle, and I could SEE the targets (with the 12x Leupold scope) out to 500+ yards but it couldn't handle the cross-wind because the lighter bullets were too badly buffeted by the afternoon crosswinds.   Eventually, I just shot the close targets with the '06, used the '250 out to 500 yards, and then I was through for the day.  I wasn't about to swap the scoped in the middle of a shoot.

(BTW I just checked the settings on the Leupold scope; it's still set at 450 yards.)

The first year we just flopped in the grass on the shooting line on an old blanket with some make-shift sandbags.

The second year I managed to bring a home-made portable 3-legged shooting bench with attached 'stools' for both shooter and spotter; this worked much better.  One of us would shoot, the other would spot the shots.  It's FAR better to do this kind of long-range precision shooting with a spotter!   And yes, you CAN see the bullet in flight, through the spotting scope.

And for the really far targets (out to 650 yards, then) you absolutely need a larger-caliber, heavier bullet and a quality bench rest.  And a spotter with a good spotting scope.

Even with a 3# trigger pull and a bench rest, the lighter bullets from the .22-250 just don't have the ability to resist the cross-wind at ranges over 400 yards, even though I had been shooting groundhogs at ranges of 400 yards with the 22-250 for years.


POSTSCRIPT

I'm wishing Kevin good luck and a lot of fun

And expect to experience some physical discomfort, too.  I'm sure the arrangements are much more professional than the earlier years.

(See the 'inconvenient consequences' advisory, at the top of the page, which I wrote before my second Boomershoot.)

(Joe comments that I hadn't been to a boomershoot before; he was wrong.  That's why I wrote this song.)

Y'll have fun now, Kevin.  Y'hear?