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CHA-LEE's Tale


CHA-LEE

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The results from Sunday’s match have been posted. Even with zeroing the classifier stage I still ended up 6th out of thirteen shooters in Limited division. On the last stage where I went for it with the 22 rounds in the gun, I won the stage which is cool. Now I need to put that much faith in my shooting for every stage.

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Wow the match last night was chocked full of “Lessons” for me. On the first stage I chose to engage all of the targets by point shooting and put my focus on speed of movement. The stage was 24 rounds with three shooting boxes. The targets were a mixture of partial no shoot blocked targets, hard cover and a few wide open ones. In the middle box there were two targets in the front that could only be accessed from the middle box, but the back two targets could be engaged by the far left or right boxes as well. I chose to engage the far back targets from the left and right boxes. This allowed me to not even stop in the middle box to engage the two close targets. This is where the first lesson comes in. I mentally rehearsed the first and second box many many times as there was a lot of tricky shooting on the move and a reload thrown in there. But I failed to rehearse the last shooting box as diligently as I did the first two boxes. So when the buzzer went off I shot all the targets in the first and second box just as I wanted and hit my reload perfectly. Then when I got to the last shooting box I called a miss on the third to last target and went back to pick it up, but failed to engage the final target in the string that was the back target from the middle shooting box position. The failure to engage the last target it’s a toss up between NOT rehearsing what should be done in the last box or realizing that I needed to make up the miss and when I went back to make it up but then totally forgot about finishing up the string of targets. Either way, I am going to rehearse the whole stage evenly from now on. Not just the tricky parts. The second lesson I learned on the stage is that even though I can point shoot the targets and get hits on them, the hits were not good. I had a boat load of “C” and “D” zone hits. I think part of it was due to the placement of the no shoots made the center of the Brown target in a poor scoring area. When I point shoot I end up getting hits in the center of mass on the brown of the target. Some times this is good, some times this is bad depending on where the center of mass is located. In this case, it wasn’t good. The good of this first stage is that my shooting speed, movement and reload were spot on and really fast. Even though I failed to engage the last target I would have still been a second faster than the fastest time in Limited. Granted, my collection of poor point hits would still have hurt my hit factor. It was still nice to shoot and move through the stage at a pace that was where it should be. I need to get some more practice at this speed to hone my accuracy back in.

The second stage was the classifier. I told myself to shoot it like any other stage and I figured that I would keep to my point shooting strategy in order to max out my speed. Well, this back fired on me since the targets were back further than before and I ended up with 4 misses. The lesson here is that point shooting is only good up to a certain distance, then your accuracy really starts to going down hill. I had a fast stage time, but when you get crap hits and misses it really does not matter. I need to do some more training on my point shooting distances. I need to find my comfort zone where I can confidently point shoot targets and still get C zone or better hits. Otherwise its not worth the risk of losing a bunch of points or possible misses.

Lessons, Lessons, Lessons…..

I think I need to set aside some time and do some more live fire practice. I have not done any dedicated live fire practice in a while and its starting to show in my match performance. The positive thing here is that I think I have brought my shooting speed and movement up to the next level. Now I have to get use to shooting and moving at this faster speed to bring my accuracy back to where it should be. Its like I have to completely relearn what I need to see for an acceptable sight picture to call my shots correctly.

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I did some draw testing last night during dry fire. I decided to do some timing exercises between my blade tech paddle holster and my Ghost race holster. I was able to draw and dry fire one shot about 2 tenths faster with the Ghost holster if I used a sideways grab at the gun to pop it out of the holster. I couldn’t do this with the Blade tech holster because any about of sideways movement as you draw and the muzzle of the gun gets jammed up in the holster and won’t come out. You basically have to pull it straight up or it won’t come out without getting hung up on the holsters sides. The Ghost holster is faster but it is also a lot less comfortable as most of the weight of the gun pushes in on your leg in one single place. The paddle holster hangs from the belt and lightly touches your leg so its WAY more comfortable for wearing all day. So I had a dilemma, Do I go for fast and painful, or slow and comfortable??? OR, can I work on the blade tech paddle holster to make it as fast as the Ghost. Throwing caution to the wind, I went after the paddle holster with the dremel and kept chopping away at it until it felt just about as unrestricted as the Ghost. I ended up cutting down the portion that covers the slide to about an inch below the breach face. Surprisingly enough, it still holds the gun really secure even though its been cut way down. After the chop job I did some more draw timing and was pleased to see that I could achieve the same times with the Blade Tech as with the Ghost using the sideways grab method. I think this is super cool as it is a lot faster now but will still be really comfortable to wear all day at the matches. I am looking forward to giving it a try this Sunday at the match.

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Nice USPSA match on Sunday. Six stages of fun in the sun. Well, mostly sun as it was transitioning between overcast and sunny the whole day. But at least it wasn’t raining or snowing which made it a really nice day for shooting. My new holster modification only came into use on one stage and on that stage it got hung up as I tried to pull the gun out. There are rubber grommets that set the squeeze depth on the gun and I think that those settled in over the couple of days I had it sitting after fiddling with it and it got tighter. I loosened it back up after that run and it was back to being good. Oh well, there will always be some level of tweaking needed to get things right. I shot the stages with a speed focus on keeping moving and shooting above my accuracy comfort zone. My movement though the stages was really good and I was really happy with my performance. My accuracy was down though and ended up with 4 mikes and 2 no shoots. No excuses, but there were a lot of tight no shoot blocked shots and I don’t think many people in the whole match shot it clean. I do know that all of the top shooters in each division had some mikes and no shoots so I didn’t feel too bad about collecting some myself. There were a couple of stages where I shot sections of them strong hand only to save time or minimize the risk of breaking the 180 as I backed up out of a shooting position. I was able to shoot very solidly strong hand only and it’s nice to see that my practice with it is paying off nicely. It netted me a 2nd place finish on one stage so that was really rewarding. My hero run for the day happened on the classifier. The classifier was 99-21 called Mini Mart. Its an awkward start stage where you have to get your gun out of a cubby hole below a table. You also have to get your magazine from there as well for the mandatory reload. I forced myself to not think of it as a classifier stage and just shoot it like the rest of the stages and what do you know, I end up with an 88% national average run on it. That result along with my other good classifiers to be posted in the next classifier calculation should bump me into “A” class. We will see how it all turns out though as I am not sure how the funky math rules will turn out on which classifiers count or not when it’s recalculated. The classifications should be recalculated some time this week so we will see. It will be cool to bump up to “A” Class but I am not worried about it. I know that I am capable of shooting more classifiers at or above A class in the future. So it will happen eventually.

Overall I was happy with my finish for the match. I placed 5th in Limited behind one GM and three Master shooters. I could have done better if my accuracy was more honed in, but even if I had no misses or no shoots I think it would have only moved me up to 4th. So there is much more work needed in all areas. Number one on my list is more trigger time at the faster stage movement speed so I can get use to it and bring my accuracy back in line to where it should be. I will get there eventually. I keep asking better shooters what I need to work on to get better and the common response is “More time” or “More Experience”. I have only been shooting since August of 08 so I don’t have a lot of match/shooting experience compared to others, but I also don’t want to look at that as some kind of artificial crutch. I have made it this far with hard work and dedication, why can’t I do even better if I keep at it, regardless of time in the sport???

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I have made it this far with hard work and dedication, why can’t I do even better if I keep at it, regardless of time in the sport???

you can!!!

you said it yourself where you said you SHO shooting practice paid off in the match.

find the things you are falling short on in a match and work on those both dryfire and livefire.

for me its shooting on move..my points count drops when I shoot on the move. I continue to work on group shooting at distance on partials and SHO/WHO shooting. also I am working on keeping a lower center of gravity, harder grip pressure and seeing quicker.

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You know I just realized your avatar looks just like you Charlie :roflol:

Was nice shooting with you yesterday even though you talked me into shooting that darn stage SHO when I knew I shouldn't have.

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You know I just realized your avatar looks just like you Charlie :roflol:

Was nice shooting with you yesterday even though you talked me into shooting that darn stage SHO when I knew I shouldn't have.

what did you guys shoot SHO???

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what did you guys shoot SHO???

Everything on stage one except the three paper on the left side of the wall. Everything else we shot SHO around the right side of the wall.

Charlie shot it well, I shot it terrible in like 15 second.

I tried again for fun using the center window and ran it with the same crappy hits as my first run in 11.5 or so.

I had originally planned to do it through the center window but Charlie's run made me change my plan, which in retrospect I shouldn't have.

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eerw> Thanks boss. You always know the good stuff, and share what you know. That’s probably why you are a GM and a super cool dude :)

As for the first stage and taking most of it strong hand only, to me it just didn't make sense to dick around with that middle port when you had to go to both ends to access the single targets blocked by the barrels. The only way to shoot the stage by only going to both extreme ends was to pick one side to shoot free style and then clean up the rest of the targets one handed. For me, shooting Strong Hand only has never really been a weak point so I figured that shooting the three paper targets on the left side as I packed up to the right side then hang on the wall and shoot the rest of the paper and the steel strong hand only was the best approach. This was the best approach for me and I was confident in knowing that I could do it. This is probably why it worked out so well. As for Chris doing it the same way, that was a decision that he may have regretted at the moment. But I still think that was a really good eye opener for him to know what he needs to work on in the future.

Chris and I did debate on which way would be faster, going to the port or not, but I think in the end the lesson for all is that you need to leverage the skill sets that you are the most confident with. For me, I wasn’t confident that I could get low for the port then back up to clean up the rest of the targets from the far side faster than just taking the time to shoot most of the targets strong hand only. I am a big dude and getting in and out of cramped places is not my forte. Using my big Wookie like paw to manage recoil and mow down targets quickly strong hand only is easy for me. This is more like a battle axe style approach. Probably not so good for Chris. He has quick ninja like reflexes and is able to move in and out of places way faster than me, so using the port was probably in his best interest. We traded off idea’s through out the whole match and to me, regardless of finishing order, was a great experience. We would purposefully pick opposite plans of attach for a stage just to see which way would yield the best time. Like the second stage, Chris chose to engage all of the targets from two shooting positions, basically at the two back barrels were your gun started. I chose to run around the stage and engage the targets on the move and from at least 4 shooting positions. I thought for sure my way of going through the stage would be slower simply because I had double the shooting positions, but very much to my surprise my stage time was a couple seconds faster than his. Its lessons like those that can only be learned in situations like that where you have creative shooters trying stuff just to see what works best. Chris is great to shoot with, not to mention a great shooter, and I really like his ability to be open and subjective when it comes to stage plans and figuring things out. I learn a lot from him and appreciate his help!!!

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rtr> It was great shooting with you on Sunday and thanks again for all of your help. I hope that you don’t feel like I tricked you into shooting the first stage like I did. That wasn’t my intent. That is unless you want to buy some once used primers, if so I have about 10,000 to unload. Just send me your credit card number :roflol:

Lets do some more shooting together in the future. I always have great time and learned a lot when shooting with you. I hope that you don’t feel bad about me trying to learn all of your ninja shooting skills. I have to take what I can get man, the road to getting good at this stuff is a rocky up hill battle that has no mercy for the weak.

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good deal..we had some shooters do that..and I looked at that too.

I chose the third position in the port..my reasons..I had to stuff a reload anyway ( 12 rounds to that side ) and I was concerned with dropping too many points on the two far targets shooting production. seeing the results I am off 2-4 seconds to you guys in limited and open, but 4 seconds faster than anyone else in production and shot 3 charlies.

you guys are a little taller too..so going to the port is slower and going around the side is a little easier.

this is one of the reasons I really like the PPPS matches as they really offer freestyle thinking on the stages.

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eerw> I uploaded the video of my Stage 1 with the strong hand shooting and listed the link below. I have watched it a few times and all I can see are my errors and inefficiencies..... uuuggghhh its such a train wreck. My draw and first shot take like 2 weeks and then the plan was to shoot as I was backing up but I stopped moving on the last two targets in the string. The only saving grace on this run is that I took my time shooting strong hand to get solid hits on every target. I dropped 6 points on this stage, all C hits, with them all being below the A box. I am not use to shooting these "Turtle Targets" and the A zone really isn't the center of mass of the whole target. Yet another thing to practice the next time out for some live fire practice.

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I hope that you don’t feel like I tricked you into shooting the first stage like I did. That wasn’t my intent.

Nope I decided to do it all on my own, not your fault:)

Lets do some more shooting together in the future. I always have great time and learned a lot when shooting with you. I hope that you don’t feel bad about me trying to learn all of your ninja shooting skills. I have to take what I can get man, the road to getting good at this stuff is a rocky up hill battle that has no mercy for the weak.

Despite my jealousy that you've gotten to my level in less than a year of shooting this sport (and it's taken me almost 6), I very much enjoy helping out when I can. But I think you've probably learned most of the skills I have given that you kicked my butt in the match :cheers:

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The crazy classifier math is biting me in the ass now. My average went from 72.2% down to 71.4%. I had some train wreck classifiers that are affecting my classification average and some of my decent 70+% results rolled out of the last 8 classifiers that are used for the average. Then for some reason the 88% classifier that I shot last weekend isn’t listed. Maybe it didn’t make the “Cutoff” for this recalculation of the classifiers? There was also one classifier that the calculator website said was going to be an 81% ended up being a 76% instead. Like I said, crazy math. I am not going to worry about it too much. I know that I can shoot well enough to make “A” Class, I just need to put together some solid runs back to back to get out of B class. It seems like it is more of a math trap than anything. Since any Classifier that is 4.9% below your current classification counts against your average that means that any result from 55.1% up to 90% counts. Unfortunately for me, a substandard classifier will usually fall in the 55% or above range. I think I might have to take a different approach to shooting the classifiers. It will have to be Hero or Zero so it does not hurt my average. I hate to do that but I don’t see another way given the wide birth of results that can “Count” against my average.

On a good note, one of my friends is going to be attending his first match this weekend so I worked with him yesterday at the local range on the basics of how it goes at the match. We went over all of the major safety rules then the process of making ready and showing clear after the stage run. Then I ran him through a mach stage a few times as well. He should be ready to go for this weekend and I hope there isn’t too much “dear in the headlights” on match day.

I was able to do a little bit of live fire practice as well. I gave my new holster setup and draw a go with some one shot draws on a target about 5 yards away. I was able to get consistent .80 sec draws/shots and get my hits on the target. Since I was pushing speed over accuracy some of my hits would end up in the “D” zone. I also did some one shot draws on head shots and if I slowed down to the .90 – 1.0 sec range I could get the head shots every time. For me this was a HUGE leap forward. Before a “good” draw/first shot for me was in the 1.2 – 1.3 sec range and that was pushing it. Being able to physically draw and fire the gun in less than a second consistently was really nice. Now I have to burn in the technique with a boat load of dry fire. I still need to tweak my holster a little bit as the gun got jammed up in it a couple of times while drawing fast. It’s a lot better than it was at the last match, but it can be better so I will be tweaking on it some more.

I am looking forward to the match this coming weekend. It will be cool to watch my friend attend his first match and of course it will be fun for me to do some shooting as well.

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Cha-Lee - It was great watching that video of you on Stage 1, almost as smokin' as watching it live. You were self critical in your post, but you shot that stage with impressive confidence. It was a lesson for me.

eerw> I uploaded the video of my Stage 1 with the strong hand shooting and listed the link below. I have watched it a few times and all I can see are my errors and inefficiencies..... uuuggghhh its such a train wreck. My draw and first shot take like 2 weeks and then the plan was to shoot as I was backing up but I stopped moving on the last two targets in the string. The only saving grace on this run is that I took my time shooting strong hand to get solid hits on every target. I dropped 6 points on this stage, all C hits, with them all being below the A box. I am not use to shooting these "Turtle Targets" and the A zone really isn't the center of mass of the whole target. Yet another thing to practice the next time out for some live fire practice.

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hanexp> Thanks boss. I did feel and shoot that stage with confidence. I guess what I was saying is that seeing it in video shows the difference between what was intended and what happened. There will always be room for improvement and if I am not critical about what I need to do better, then I will never get better. I hope that makes sense.

When you are shooting the stage you need to be 100% confident about shooting it, even if the performance is not 100% optimal. There isn't enough time to think about doing things right or wrong during the stage run. That can only be done after the stage run is over, such as watching the video. While shooting the stage you have to let go and have the subconscious skills take over. These are what you practice and how well you perform the tasks subconsciously is directly proportionate to how well you have practiced them. For that run, I have obviously not practiced enough shooting on the move while backing up. My subconscious actions during the stage run stopped me from moving backwards while shooting the targets. The only way I am going to get better at this is to practice more shooting while backing up. The same goes with my draw. I need to practice drawing faster so that when the auto pilot takes over its fast and consistent without even thinking about it.

I have learned a ton about my faults by videoing my runs. But the good thing is that for every fault found, it gives me something to work on in practice so that the fault turns into an asset.

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Local USPSA match today. It was an up and down match for me. I focused on keeping my movement and shooting speed ramped up. I was able to move through the stages as fast or faster than the top shooters in Limited. So this was good. I had some misses though simply from not giving myself enough time for certain tight shots. The slam dunk of the match was a 32 round field course. It was basically a row of targets, mostly open some with no shoot cover, then a line of walls blocking access to them. You could basically see 5 – 6 targets from any given wall opening. You started in the middle of the stage with your gun holstered and unloaded. This was an odd starting condition as you don’t start with an unloaded and holstered pistol much. I chose to use two shooting positions. One at each extreme end of the COF. You could essentially get half the targets from one side and the other half from the other side. The last two targets to engage from the right side were very tight shots blocked by two no shoots and you basically had to be falling out of the shooting area to gain access to them. I rocked the house on that stage running through it in 15.7 seconds. I did have one miss, but even with that I still won the stage due to the fast time. The second fastest Limited shooter on the stage did it in 18.3 seconds. But to his merit he did get a better hits on the targets because he was taking more time for the shots.

The low of the match was on a quick stage where I had a bad jam where I had to remove the magazine and reinsert it to clear the jam. Very uncommon for my equipment to fail so I marked and set aside the magazine. When I got home and checked it out, the feed lips had spread out too far and I have had jamming issues in the past when they were in this same state. So, the major lesson of the day is CHECK ALL OF YOUR MAGS to make sure they are in spec before attending a match. I have been getting a little lazy on double checking the mags and what do you know, it bites me in the ass.

The second thing that bit me AGAIN was my chopped up blade tech holster. If you don’t pull the gun straight up during the draw it gets hung up. ANY amount of forward movement during the draw and it gets hung up. This will not work. I have pulled out the Ghost Holster and got it tuned up for use tomorrow. Even though it is painful to wear because it digs into my leg, it at least does not hang up on the gun when drawing. I was doing an inventory of what the other limited and open shooters were using for holsters and it seemed like the popular choice is the CR Speed holster. I have ordered one up and will see how it works compared to the Ghost Holster. Now that I have had the taste of sub one second draw/first shots, I can’t go back to the full paddle blade tech holster.

I took the Hero or Zero approach to the Classifier and ended up with a nice stage time but the two mikes that came with it pretty much turned it into a Zero performance. Oh well, I would rather have it get blown out and not count verses being somewhat decent and screw up my classifier average.

Somehow I ended up third in Limited behind two masters, 84% of the winner. I know that I could have gotten a solid second place if my gun wouldn’t have jammed on the one stage but that’s how the cookie crumbles. The whole package has to be firing on all cylinders in order to produce a good finishing result.

I am going to forego the Sunday USPSA match this weekend and do some live fire practice instead. I want to give the Ghost Holster a good shake down run and also work on my weak spots. Right now I could get more out of a full day of polishing up the weak spots verses another competition day. So tomorrow should be full of lessons and doing stuff I suck at. I need to build up that skills tool box so I can be a more rounded shooter. Avoiding options that I am weak at isn’t a viable option during a match, its just a band aid.

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I had a great practice session on Sunday with SA Friday. We worked on a lot of the things I have been struggling with and it felt like I made some progress. I also used the Ghost Holster all day and much to my surprise it didn’t dig into my leg and hurt as bad as I thought it would. We tried a lot of things thinking outside of the “box” with movement, target engagement order, and stuff like that just to see which way felt better verses which way was actually faster. Its nice to have a chance to explore different things outside of a match. I went through about 250 rounds and I think it was amazing how much I learned with such a low round count shot. I have had other practice days where I burn through 400 – 500 rounds and didn’t learn a tenth of what I did yesterday. SA Friday is a great guy to shoot with and has much to offer in guidance and suggestions. When we were done practicing he had to sight in his AR so I checked that out and got to shoot it a little. It has been a long time since I shot a rifle and man that AR awesome to shoot. The weather was great all day, got to shoot and learned in the process. It can’t get much better than that!!!

Indoor USPSA match tonight. Time to see if I can implement the things I learned yesterday.

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I had a great practice session on Sunday with SA Friday. We worked on a lot of the things I have been struggling with and it felt like I made some progress. I also used the Ghost Holster all day and much to my surprise it didn’t dig into my leg and hurt as bad as I thought it would. We tried a lot of things thinking outside of the “box” with movement, target engagement order, and stuff like that just to see which way felt better verses which way was actually faster. Its nice to have a chance to explore different things outside of a match. I went through about 250 rounds and I think it was amazing how much I learned with such a low round count shot. I have had other practice days where I burn through 400 – 500 rounds and didn’t learn a tenth of what I did yesterday. SA Friday is a great guy to shoot with and has much to offer in guidance and suggestions. When we were done practicing he had to sight in his AR so I checked that out and got to shoot it a little. It has been a long time since I shot a rifle and man that AR awesome to shoot. The weather was great all day, got to shoot and learned in the process. It can’t get much better than that!!!

Indoor USPSA match tonight. Time to see if I can implement the things I learned yesterday.

sorry I missed that...with my schedule this week...my wife would've had my stuff out in the garage waiting for me :roflol:

sounds like you had a great session..sometimes those are the best.

see ya tonight

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Fun match last night. Since there wasn’t a lot of shooters I was able to shoot a second gun of Limited-10. This was cool because I used the two division runs as test beds to try out different strategies. The first stage was a 22 round box to box course. Three shooting boxes. From the first box you engaged two targets, one open and one half covered with a no shoot. From the second box you engaged four targets, two open on the outside and two in the middle blocked by a shared no shoot. Then there was a single open target that you had to engage on the move from box 2 to 3. Once you got into the third box there was four targets one open and three heavily blocked by no shoots. Pretty straight up stage and in Limited I loaded up to 22 rounds and planned on not performing a reload. I decided to mix it up a little bit and try to shoot on the move through the second box instead of stopping and planting to engage the targets. Shooting on the move through the box did not work out well at all. It took too much time for me to shoot the four targets and my feet were moving too fast and I ended up stepping out of the box and having to come back into it in order to engage the last target in the string. Since I was off balance trying to stay in the box my accuracy was not good at all and ended up getting two no shoot hits. This was obviously not the best way of negotiating the stage. In my Limited-10 run I engaged the targets the “normal” way by planting in the second box and was able to shoot faster and more accurately. I had one miss on the last shot in the middle box string because I turned my head right as I broke the shot starting the movement to the next position. This pulled the shot to the left. The funny part about this was that my Limited-10 run was two tenths of a second faster than my Limited run, even though I had two mag changes to do on the Limited-10 run. All of the shuffling around and needing to come back into the middle box on the Limited run really killed my time. I should have run it at least a second faster than the Limited-10 run simply because I wouldn’t have to screw around with mag changes. Oh well, the lesson learned is to not try to jam a bunch of complicated movement into a shooting box when you don’t have to.

The Second stage was the classifier called On The Move (CM03-09). Time to experiment again and also take the Hero or Zero approach on shooting the stage. The stage has four targets, two walls and a pretty big shooting box. Two of the targets are on the outside of the walls and then the other two targets are in the middle blocked by a shared no shoot. There are two strings of fire. You basically start at the back corner of one side (Left or Right) of the shooting box. You can see three of the four targets from the starting position but you have to move to see and engage the last target that is blocked by the wall. One string is starting on the back left of the shooting box and the other string is starting on the back right. My Limited gun was up first so I figured I would start with my weak point first, shooting on the move from right to left, to see if I was able to get all of my hits. Shooting on the move got me a mid three second time but my accuracy wasn’t up to the task on the far away middle targets and I ended up hitting the no shoot. So with a no shoot and a mike on the first string this classifier was pretty much going to be a Zero run anyway. I shot the second string the same way on the move to the right, my hits and time were better but I figured I wanted to make sure that I didn’t end up with a 60% on the stage to screw up my average so I took an extra shot directly in the middle of the no shoot. I would rather truly zero the stage verses have it count against my average. In Limited-10, I took a different approach. Instead of shooting on the move I took a single large step as I engaged the three targets I could see and by the time I needed to get the last target I was over far enough to pick up the C Zone on the last one. I did this both directions and ended up with a 77% result. Even though I was able to put in a decent run doing it this way I still think there is a better way to shooting this classifier. The shooting box is pretty large, 8 foot wide by 4 feet deep, so I was thinking that maybe it would work better if you move diagonally forward towards the opposite corner as you engaged the targets. Advancing diagonally on the move is a lot easier than trying to move directly sideways. I think I am going to setup this classifier on the next live fire practice day to explore different ways of shooting it. I can’t shake this feeling that I am missing something on how to shoot it.

Well, it wasn’t a stellar night of shooting for me from a performance standpoint. But there were some good lessons learned so that made it all worth it.

Lots of shooting this coming weekend. A Steel Challenge match on Friday and then two USPSA matches on the weekend. I will be loading a bunch of ammo this week to make sure that I have enough to cover these matches. Watching my primer supply slowly deplete is painful since I have no idea when my back orders for primers will show up. I just hope that they show up before I completely run out of primers.

Edited by CHA-LEE
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Lots of blasting coming this weekend. Friday I am attending the Area 2 Rocky Mountain Steel Challenge match. I have never shot any of the steel challenge stages so it should be an entertaining experience. I really need to work on my surrender draws so this match should produce a lot of practice for that. Saturday is a local club match were I go early and help setup since its so close to my house. Then Sunday is another USPSA match up in the mountains.

I loaded about 1000 rounds last night and that should cover what is needed for this weekend and probably next weekend as well. So far I have been building small batches of bullets every week to support the shooting for the coming weekend. I have been thinking about dedicating a bunch of time to loading up 3000 – 5000 rounds just so I don’t have to jack around with it all the time. The one thing holding me back is that I think it’s a good hand and arm workout when I build up bullets on a regular basis. I also don’t want to burn out on reloading if I do a huge run at the same time. I will see how this once every two week situation works out.

I ordered a CR Speed holster to replace the Ghost Holster but it wont come in until some time next week. So the Ghost will have to get the job done this weekend. With three solid days of shooting I will be surprised if I don’t have a tender spot were the Ghost Holster pushes in on my leg. I also hope that there are no surrender, facing up range draw stages, where you have to turn and draw. With the Ghost Holster unlocked it does not take much effort to pop the gun out. In dry fire testing I was able to pop the gun loose if I turned my hips too quickly. That is another thing that I really don’t like about the Ghost Holster. Since it only retains the gun by the corner edge of the trigger guard it can flop around and pop loose. If there was a bracket that came down and held the barrel as well like other holsters it would be a lot more secure. This is why I am looking forward to getting the CR Speed holster in and tuned up. So I am crossing my fingers in hopes for no turn surrender draw stages this weekend. No one wants to see a loaded gun fall out of a holster and hit the ground. :wacko:

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You should be OK for the steel match and Aurora. Steel is all surrender facing down range. Aurora avoids the facing up range stuff because of... well, politics...

Look at the steel stages here on BE and read the discussed strategy on shooting sequences for the standard steel stages. You might be suprised which sequences work better than others. The stages are fairly simple, but some sequences that seem odd actually work better for me. Oh ya, also remember that .2 seconds spent aiming is better than .4 seconds missing and shooting another round... Try to get there early tomorrow and try to squad with one of the GM's. I'll be out there tomorrow, but I'm not shooting the match. I'll be watching and socializing.

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what did you guys shoot SHO???

Everything on stage one except the three paper on the left side of the wall. Everything else we shot SHO around the right side of the wall.

Charlie shot it well, I shot it terrible in like 15 second.

I tried again for fun using the center window and ran it with the same crappy hits as my first run in 11.5 or so.

I had originally planned to do it through the center window but Charlie's run made me change my plan, which in retrospect I shouldn't have.

I ran it SHO and so did Glenn. The port was a red herring. I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure most shot it SHO and skipped the port.

1 Paul Jr. 60 GM Limited 88 0 9.40 9.3617 90.0000 100.00%

2 Charlie P 21 B Limited 84 0 11.08 7.5812 72.8829 80.98%

3 Jerry W 59 M Limited 81 0 11.49 7.0496 67.7723 75.30%

4 Mathew H 53 M Limited 80 0 13.37 5.9835 57.5232 63.91%

5 Sean M 43 B Limited 85 0 15.42 5.5123 52.9933 58.88%

6 Jeff M 57 M Limited 73 0 13.55 5.3875 51.7935 57.55%

7 Ray P 12 B Limited 82 0 16.06 5.1059 49.0863 54.54%

8 Paul Sr. 58 B Limited 86 0 18.50 4.6486 44.6900 49.66%

9 Keith P 36 B Limited 84 0 19.83 4.2360 40.7234 45.25%

10 Denise J 14 C Limited 79 0 19.61 4.0286 38.7295 43.03%

11 Doug S 18 B Limited 78 10 20.16 3.3730 32.4268 36.03%

12 Chris M 40 A Limited 73 20 15.72 3.3715 32.4124 36.01%

13 Conrad H 23 C Limited 72 10 18.55 3.3423 32.1317 35.70%

14 Chris C 24 D Limited 67 10 20.63 2.7630 26.5625 29.51%

15 Curtis B 22 U Limited 79 10 36.86 1.8719 17.9958 20.00%

WOW, look at that B way up high on the stage results, cough cough sandbagger cough cough... :P

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SA Friday> I know, I am such a sand bagger :rolleyes: …….. Seriously though, I am trying my best to bump up to A class. I think I am shooting at A class level now on most of the stages, but seem to keep missing the mark on the classifiers. Oh well, it will happen sooner or later.

A real gauge of how well I am doing will be the regional match next month. I will be attending the High Desert Classic in Albuquerque and there are currently 4 GM’s in Limited. So my goal is to finish at least 75% of the winner of Limited division. We will see how it goes. If I don’t run into any freak equipment issues it should be doable.

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