This weekend we squadded with several people we haven't competed with together. Note that I have declined to present videos of two new shooters: Mike and his teenage daughter, Alex.
Squad member Sheri wore her new Match Shirt, and I was happy to gather her, SWMBO and new shooter Alex for a photo of The Ladies.I don't know about you, but I still remember my first match in 1983. If videotaping competitor performance was the normal thing to do then, I would be grateful that nobody filmed my performance then. I'm repaying the sport by not showing the performance of new shooters today.
Mike and Alex, if you REALLY want to see how you did at this match -- email me. Everybody else, think back on your first match and remember: you don't want to know.
Actually, both Mike and Alex did just fine. They shot safe and, usually, accurately . When they ran into problems on the challenging stages, they took more time than other people in the squad. But they were never scary people and I would be proud to squad with them again.
There were six stages in this match. I had a limited number of photos from Stage 2 (AtoBtoC) so that stage is not represented in this album.
The five stages which ARE represented here are:
Stage 1: Paper Plates - 3mb download file size
This is the stage our squad started on. You start behind a barrier, dodge around the barrier to shoot at a half-dozen paper targets, then dodge around another barrier to engage six 8" plaes on a plate rack.
This is typical of the stages presented today. Essentially, you start out shooting fast and then you have to slow down and shoot slow to finish the stage. The people who won this stage never slowed down: they were so talented (or so skilled) that they never slowed down.
The only person I filmed was SWMBO, who did a fine job but not good enough to win the stage. She beat my time, didn't get as many points. We both shot the stage in 19.** seconds. Tenth place (out of 56 shooters) was 14.** seconds.
Stage 2: AtoBtoC - no photos or videos
I only filmed one shooter on this stage, and it was one of the new shooters, so I didn't publish the video. It was something a memory course with only four targets, and you had to shoot them from three different positions (with vision barriers restricting access to the targets.) It scored the best 6 hits on each target.
I thought I did a good job at getting all of my hits in 15 seconds. Tenth place was a Junior Production-Division competitor (Chris C.) who completed the stage in 10 seconds. I have decided not to be discouraged by being beaten by Chris C. in Production. This young man is a very tough competitor, and I look forward to the day when he beats me in every stage, instead of only half of the stages.
This should take him approximately 90 days.
I'm shooting Open, he's shooting Production.
I've been competing for 23 years, he has been competing for one year.
I never liked Chris.
Okay, that's a lie. I'm pleased that this sport allows a young man to experience competitive shooting in a safe environment, and especially that he can learn the joy of shooting VERY well. All of the Columbia Cascade Section Junior Squad are keen competitors, and as enthusiastic as a basketfull of pups. They are the hope for tomorrow, and a credit to coach Mike McCarters endless hours of instruction and example.
MD NOTE: This stage featured four very close targets, with the best six hits scoring. The scenario (you had to be there) was that you needed to engage each target at least once from three different shooting boxes. Lots of people took extra shots, so there were a lot of holes in these targets.Stage 3: Steely Speed VII - 4mb download file size
Fifty four shooters times a minimum of six holes for each shooters equals over 300 holes in each target. Because the targets were typically within six feet of the shooting boxes, most of the holes were in the A-zone. It was a hoser stage, so you know what it looked like when we got to the stage.
We were the second squad on the stage, and the targets were a mass of tape. We ran a couple of shooters through it, realized that we couldn't determine which holes were caused by the current shooter and which were the result of tape being blasted off holes made by earlier shooters, and replaced the targets.
Good news: the MD (Trevor) had already placed a replacement set of targets on the bay.
Bad news: there was only one set, and we expected to leave the stage with targets in the same shape as when we got there.
VERY good news: Trevor walked by as we were shooting, and I advised him that he needed at least two, maybe three sets of replacement targets. (There were six squads at the match.) He immediately brought us two more sets of targets, and we helped him to tape and paint the requisite hard-cover zones on those targets which needed it. This took less than five minutes, and it is a credit to the Dundee club (CVSC) and the Match Director (Trevor) that the response was so immediate and so helpful.
This is a Classifier stage, which requires you to engage six steel targets (three Pepper Poppers, three U.S. Poppers) from behind a Bianchi Barricade.
The videos show SWMBO, Fish and me shooting the stage, and none of us strutted on the way home.
The 10th place finisher (Bill M., who is one of th B-Open shooters against whom I am directly competing) completed the stage in 4.77 seconds.
Nobody in my squad came close to this mark. In fact, I did fairly well and my squad-members congratulated me. I responded to the effect that "by this time, six people have beat my time on this stage". In the actual event, 10 people beat my time on this stage.
Four of them weren't competing in Open division.
I am terribly impressed!
Stage 4: The Rest Of The Steel - 6mb download file size
This stage features a lot of full-faced cardboard targets, and then forces the competitor to bear down to engage a lot of steel targets. I should mention that this match was a "rain match", which means that the usual lot of dirty tricks were avoided by the stage designers because they expected rain. It didn't rain on this day; instead, it was a beautiful warm day (forty degrees plus) with gusts of wind which tended to blow the targets ... both cardboard and steel ... down at the least opportune moment. No criticism to either the stage designers or the people who built the stages.
Those of us who shot the stage (which included both the stage designers ... MD Trevor and RM Bill) found that we needed to put weights on the target stands to encourage them to stand up during the occasional farts. Not our gasseous digestions, but the classic meteorlogical definition: "A short puff of wind."
You may find the cited reference doesn't acknowledge my definition of the word.
Deal with it.
I finished well behind the 10th place 13.55 seconds / 100 points, largely because I missed a 10" plate two times before I knocked it down. Like most of the stages in this match, winners were determined by their ability to hit small targets quickly.
In case it sounds like 'sour grapes' to you, this is the epitome of IPSC competition, and I do not object to the design of any of the stages. The opportunity to excel was present in every stage, and it was a challenging match.
This may have been the defining stage of the match, except for the stage which followed it ...
Stage 5: Pretty Easy - 16mb download file size (well, there were a lot of interesting videos)
"Pretty Easy" ... wasn't.
This stage prominently featured the Texas Star, and was the downfall of many competitors.
There was a 'hard cover' IPSC-target-shaped steel plate in front of the Star, and this scared the bejiminees out of many of the competitors. I'm not sure why, but I suppose it's part of the "Steel Targets Are Hard To Shoot" mindset, which is something that can screw the mind of any competitor who allows it to become a problem.The thing to do is to just ... ignore the hardcover, and shoot the target you can see.
This is much like the shooting problem involved in any target with hardcover. It's another way in which the stage designer may choose to play with your mind, and allow you to defeat yourself.
It's worth a short note here to define the best way to engage the STAR rotating target, especially in reference to a hard-cover plate which obscures the targets during part of the rotatin.
First, realize that the hard-cover (as seen here) does not prohibit your engagement of the final target when the array is at rest. That means that, if you just wait a few seconds, the final plate WILL appear from behind the hardcover.
The trick is to coax it out from its hidey-hole as quickly as possible. That means that (unlike those stages where all targets in the Star are always visible), you want to make the rotation work for you.
The BEST way to shoot the Star, assuming it starts 'at rest' (the array isn't already rotating when you first engage it), is to shoot the top plate (on either side, if the top plate isn't" straight up"), then shoot the highest falling plate to slow it down or, ideally, even stop the rotational movement long enough to shoot the highest plate on the OTHER side.
If you do that with reasonable quickness, and accurately, you can essentially keep the array in balance. The falling-plate side is the heaviest, so by knocking off the highest falling plate you shift the weight to the OTHER side (the rising side), which then wants to move 'down'.
By going from one side to the other, you have the time to engage a plate which is either stopped (reversing direction), or moving very slowly.
----
But when you have a hardcover covering part of the plate, it's easier to shoot the top plate, then the highest plate on the side away from the hardcover. In this case, those are the plates on the left side because the hardcover is on the right side.
You probably (if you're following this lame description) thinking that this is counter-intuitive. If you keep shooting plates off the left side of the Star, wouldn't the Star rotate ever faster? The answer is that it takes a little time for the acceleration to occur, and you're removing energy with every plate you knock off.
But the rotation doesn't really start until you knock off the 2nd plate (top left), so the momentum doesn't have time to build. If you don't miss.
Besides, if you shoot the top left plate and then the top right plate, you set up a fast oscillation which makes it much more difficult to hit the plates unless you are willing to wait for the plates to slow down at the top of their arc ... or unless you're a very good shot. Most of us are not.
All you have to do is to shoot the top plate on the side opposite the hardcover, and do that five times is a row. Slow down enough to get the hits, and you end up looking pretty good on film.
WARNING: Do NOT shoot a low plate! That shifts the center of balance away from the bottom, where you want it to be, to the top, where you decidedly do NOT want it to be.
WARNING: Even more important, do NOT 'split plates'. That means that if you have three plates to shoot at it's better to shoot the falling plate but if you shoot the center plate you will have a Shooting Problem From Heck. Review the video and see what happens when you split the plates.
If you find yourself in that situation, shoot the highest plate, always. This shifts the balance to the lower levels, and they tend to dampen the rotational momentum so you have very slow movement.
Ultimately, I was very proud of my 15 second time on the stage, until I discovered that the good shooters were finishing the stage in 10 to 13 seconds.
Stage 6: Public Parking - 7mb download file size
This 31-round stage had a lot of challenging near-and-far targets, and was something of a memory course. They had snow-fencing vision barriers all over the place, and they put targets in places where you didn't immediately realizes there WERE places. They had seven steel targets, two of which activated 'clam-shell' type IPSC targets and the Pepper Poppers obscured US Poppers. Very challenging.
MD NOTE: It was also the slowest stage of the match, because the clamshells were WAY downrange and required the RO to walk far away from the center of the bay to score them. I'm not saying this is A Bad Thing; these were the targets which generally separated the winners from the losers. (I was a Loser, I had trouble hitting those little plates to activate the IPSC targets. Some shooters couldn't hit them at that range.)Unfortunately, the cold weather played merry hell with the batteries in the cameras, so we only got two full videos of this stage. Sure, I could have gone to the car and grabbed the warm battery stashed there for emergencies, but we were having too much time to leave the squad. At least the videos we DID get show me missing one of the US Poppers hidden behind a Pepper Popper, so you get an idea of how easy it was to foul your stage score on this stage.
But it took about 30 seconds for the RO to score those two targets, and multiplied by the 54 competitors that adds about 4 minutes to the clearance time for each of the six squads. Our squad finished on that stage, and the RM was bouncing up to recover scoresheets before we cleared the stage because ours was that far behind all the other squads, who had already finished the match.
It was a challenging stage, but when you include that time factor in the biggest stage in the match, you have to expect that the match is going to be slowed down. The MD and the RM knew that, and they made a conscious effort to minimize the effect. I'm grateful to Bill and Trevor for dealing with this so they didn't have to eliminate the difficult targets just for the sake of speeding up the match.
You can see the scores from the match here.
INCIDENTAL NOTES:
- I hope squadmember Doug J. got his 1911 fixed. On the very last stage (Stage 6, Public Parking) his pistol decided there was no good reason why it should eject cases, and he was left with a zero score on that stage. We're thinking it was a broken extractor, and hope he lets us know that he found the problem and will get it fixed in time for next match ... in two weeks, at ARPC. You can see Doug handle the Texas Star on the Stage 5 link.
- Thanks again to Mike J. for bringing Alex to the match. She's a hard worker, a safe shooter, and cute as can be. Yes, I am aware that this is a sexist statement but we enjoyed her company and her dedication to Practical Pistol competition. We hope she and the rest of her family continue to participate in our own private exercise in public embarassment.
