CHA-LEE's Tale

[Vanniek71]

I was watching your Texas match vids, what happened at the end of Stage 3 where you walked up and stepped on the activator? Looked like you were done with the stage?

That stage had two disappearing targets that were activated by a step pad. You could choose to activate and shoot at the DT's during your stage run but you would have to navigate the whole stage, or you could shoot the majority of the stage from the back and then activate the DT's after you were done shooting. Per the USPSA rules if you don't activate DT's before the end of the course of fire, then you would incur Failure to Engage and Misses on the disappearing targets. To keep from getting that penalty all you have to do is activate the DT's before you unload and show clear, which is what I did.

Gamers Gotta Game BABY!!!

Makes sense. I googled the stages after I asked the question and mostly figured it out. Just didn't know if the timer counted or not.

And if you aren't gaming whats the point??

[ZackJones]

I'll bet that RO had a minor heart attack on stage 2 when you threw it into reverse to make up that one shot .

[CHA-LEE]

Yes he did

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I took it easy on Saturday then shot a local match on Sunday. The Sunday match was at the Aurora Gun Club and I helped out with setting up a stage. I designed a 40 round hoser stage named “15 Hit Factor”. We rarely have total hoser style stages like this and with the Rocky Mountain 300 coming up it makes sense to have a very high round count stage to get use to shooting more than 32 rounds during a stage run. This stage was a lot of fun to shoot and everyone I talked to about it loved shooting it. Being able to go blast crazy every once in a while makes everyone smile. I shot that stage pretty solidly with my only issue in completing the reload smoothly. The tip of the new mag got slightly jammed inside the magwell and I had to rock it around to make it seat to complete the reload. This probably cost me half a second on the stage but its better than missing the reload all together.

I shot most of the stages solidly and was happy with my performance. I did have one complete train wreck of a stage on the classifier. We used the classifier called “Mini Mart” and your gun and mags start in a cubby just below a table. You have to draw and reload from the cubby. At the start I drew and shot the first string good then dropped the mag for the reload. When I grabbed for the replacement mag the tip of the mag hit the top of the cubby and it got knocked out of my hand. This resulted in both of my mags sitting in the sand at my feet. I picked up one of the sand filled mags and put it in the gun hoping that it would run, but it didn’t. It would fire a shot then nose dive the second round over and over and over. I tried both “Sandy” mags and both kept nose diving and after about 25 seconds I gave up with one more shot still to make. Needless to say taking 25 seconds to shoot a 5 second classifier stage AND have a miss on top of that, resulted in capturing only 11 points on a 60 point stage. That stage pretty much sunk my match. Very surprising to me though, I ended up second in Limited only 5 match points behind Paul Clark Jr. Paul didn’t have a very good match either so I knew it would be close between us when the final results would be posted, but I didn’t expect it to be that close.

The Good thing is that my gun has been running very well ever since putting in the 9lb recoil spring. I am not worried about it not running properly on the classifier stage because the sand filled mags wouldn’t register the next round to the top and that is what was causing the nose dive jams on that stage. I haven’t had any failure to go into battery issues since replacing the 8lb spring with the 9lb spring. What was interesting is that during the chrono at the Texas State Open match the Crono RO was limp wristing the gun really bad while shooting through the chrono and it did the failure to go into battery issue on him. So this tells me that maintaining a firm grip on the gun while shooting is a requirement of using the lighter recoil springs.

Tonight I am going to attend the indoor USPSA match down in Colorado Springs. This is going to be the last club match I can attend before heading out to the Oil Field Classic in Texas on Friday. Blake Miguez and Paul Clark Jr will both be attending the Oil Field Classic so these guys will be my primary competition. If I can finish within 5% of Blake that would be a very good performance on my part. I have done it in the past, so it is possible. We will see how it goes.

[a matt]

Good luck. We are pulling for you.

[Vanniek71]

Mini mart got me last time too, went to grab the mag for the reload, and punched it to the back of the box, grabbed for it and pushed it up against the wall, had to duck down and fish it out.......

Sounds like it has it out for you too Charlie!

Good luck in TX!

[38SuperDub]

Good seeing you as always bud....see ya soon!

[CHA-LEE]

Good seeing you as always bud....see ya soon!

It was good seeing you again!!! I hope you had fun at the match with your long red socks

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended the Oil Field Classic in Bellville Texas. I guess that this is a fairly new range and this was their first major event. We were treated to 11 fun stages to shoot and it was setup in a format that allowed you to shoot the whole match in one day on either Friday or Saturday. I was signed up for the Saturday shooting schedule. I flew in on Friday and got a chance to check out all of the stages. Most of the stages were setup with a lot of close targets and very little hard cover or no shoots so there would be a crap ton of hosing going on during this match. It looked like a lot of fun and I was really looking forward to shooting the match the next day.

On Saturday the gun gods decided to test my resolve by putting gremlins in my gun and magazines. I had some kind of jam or unplanned stoppage on five of the stages. I kept getting nose dive failure to feed jams over and over. I had one failure to fire issue because the barrel didn’t fully go into battery. Then two instances where my magazine failed to drop free during the reload so I had to old rip the magazine out of the gun before I could complete the reload. Then to top it all off my rear sight started drifting to the right and I didn’t notice it until we were half way through the match. I had more gun and magazine issues in this single match than I had all of last year. I can accept getting beat by other shooters, but getting beat by your equipment really sucks.

Half way through the match I figured out what my nose dive jam issues were being caused by. I normally lube up the inside of my magazines and followers with Hornady One Shot Gun Cleaner-Degreaser and Dry Lube. This usually works well to keep everything slippery inside the magazine so the rounds can register quickly to the top of the magazine as the slide cycles. For some unknown reason the Hornady lube was failing. When I would manually strip rounds out of a magazine by hand the next round would slowly register to the top of the feed lips. I did my best to relube the magazines half way through the match but this only lasted so long before the nose dive jams stared again. I think that there was some kind of special temperature and humidity condition at the range that was allowing the Hornady lube to fail. I need to switch to a different magazine/follower lube that will not be affected by varying temps or humidity. I am going to try some spray silicone lube and see how that works. Its more of a mess than the Hornady stuff, but if messy equals 100% functionality, then messy it is.

I did my best to grind through the gun and mag issues during the match. Its very hard to stay positive and shoot confidently when you are not sure your gun is going to work or not every time you shoot a stage. When my gun was running without issues, I was able to post some good stage performances. I was able to get most of my stage runs filmed and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. You can at least be entertained by all the jams during the stage runs. I shot the match clean from a shooting penalty perspective so that also helped. But I figure that the multiple gun jams cost me about 5 mikes worth of lost match points. As with any match, if you have 5 mikes expecting a decent overall result isn’t going to happen. When all of the results were tallied I ended up Third at 89% of Blake Miguez and Paul Clark Jr was in second at 92%. Without the gun jams I would have been solidly in second place at about 95% of Blake, which is where I expected I should be able to finish. But it wasn’t meant to be this time. The hard lesson learned in needing to change the magazine lube I use was well worth the experience though. I would rather learn this lesson at a smaller major match like this verses an Area or National level match later this year.

I have a few weeks before I head back to Texas for the Cow Town Classic. Hopefully by then I will have a tested magazine lube solution that is proven solid in the local matches. Time to get back to the grind stone!!!

[Vanniek71]

CHA-LEE I was having some of the same issues as well and I went to spray silicone and it has fixed my problems. I spray the mag bodies and wipe them down and then make sure to hit the followers and springs before matches, and then I keep a towel in a ziplock coated with silicone that I'll wipe the mags down with during a match.

Seems to be working well so far.

[johnny1gun]

I also use a silicone rag for this.

Edited April 14, 2014 by johnny1gun

[CHA-LEE]

CHA-LEE I was having some of the same issues as well and I went to spray silicone and it has fixed my problems. I spray the mag bodies and wipe them down and then make sure to hit the followers and springs before matches, and then I keep a towel in a ziplock coated with silicone that I'll wipe the mags down with during a match.

Seems to be working well so far.

Thanks for the tip and confirmation. I try not to clean mags at the range if I don't have to. I bring 10 mags to every match and if I drop a mag in the dirt I decomission the mag for the day and clean/relube it when I get home. I have been using the Hornady stuff for a couple of years now without any issues so its strange that it failed to lube properly at this Texas match. I guess the environmental conditions were just right to render the Hornady stuff ineffective. I am sure that the Silicone spray will work better in these strange environment conditions. It will just be more messy and attract more dust than the Hornady stuff.

Edited April 14, 2014 by CHA-LEE

[MikeRush]

This past weekend I attended the Oil Field Classic in Bellville Texas. I guess that this is a fairly new range and this was their first major event. We were treated to 11 fun stages to shoot and it was setup in a format that allowed you to shoot the whole match in one day on either Friday or Saturday. I was signed up for the Saturday shooting schedule. I flew in on Friday and got a chance to check out all of the stages. Most of the stages were setup with a lot of close targets and very little hard cover or no shoots so there would be a crap ton of hosing going on during this match. It looked like a lot of fun and I was really looking forward to shooting the match the next day.

On Saturday the gun gods decided to test my resolve by putting gremlins in my gun and magazines. I had some kind of jam or unplanned stoppage on five of the stages. I kept getting nose dive failure to feed jams over and over. I had one failure to fire issue because the barrel didn’t fully go into battery. Then two instances where my magazine failed to drop free during the reload so I had to old rip the magazine out of the gun before I could complete the reload. Then to top it all off my rear sight started drifting to the right and I didn’t notice it until we were half way through the match. I had more gun and magazine issues in this single match than I had all of last year. I can accept getting beat by other shooters, but getting beat by your equipment really sucks.

Half way through the match I figured out what my nose dive jam issues were being caused by. I normally lube up the inside of my magazines and followers with Hornady One Shot Gun Cleaner-Degreaser and Dry Lube. This usually works well to keep everything slippery inside the magazine so the rounds can register quickly to the top of the magazine as the slide cycles. For some unknown reason the Hornady lube was failing. When I would manually strip rounds out of a magazine by hand the next round would slowly register to the top of the feed lips. I did my best to relube the magazines half way through the match but this only lasted so long before the nose dive jams stared again. I think that there was some kind of special temperature and humidity condition at the range that was allowing the Hornady lube to fail. I need to switch to a different magazine/follower lube that will not be affected by varying temps or humidity. I am going to try some spray silicone lube and see how that works. Its more of a mess than the Hornady stuff, but if messy equals 100% functionality, then messy it is.

I did my best to grind through the gun and mag issues during the match. Its very hard to stay positive and shoot confidently when you are not sure your gun is going to work or not every time you shoot a stage. When my gun was running without issues, I was able to post some good stage performances. I was able to get most of my stage runs filmed and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. You can at least be entertained by all the jams during the stage runs. I shot the match clean from a shooting penalty perspective so that also helped. But I figure that the multiple gun jams cost me about 5 mikes worth of lost match points. As with any match, if you have 5 mikes expecting a decent overall result isn’t going to happen. When all of the results were tallied I ended up Third at 89% of Blake Miguez and Paul Clark Jr was in second at 92%. Without the gun jams I would have been solidly in second place at about 95% of Blake, which is where I expected I should be able to finish. But it wasn’t meant to be this time. The hard lesson learned in needing to change the magazine lube I use was well worth the experience though. I would rather learn this lesson at a smaller major match like this verses an Area or National level match later this year.

I have a few weeks before I head back to Texas for the Cow Town Classic. Hopefully by then I will have a tested magazine lube solution that is proven solid in the local matches. Time to get back to the grind stone!!!

My mags choked in the Pacleb Ranch dust like nothing I had ever experienced before. I was brushing them between every stage with no effect. I eventually scraped off a light waxy substance that was that dust mixed with who knows what and the mags almost ran. It was bizarre. +1 on getting it out of the way at a smaller major. It sounds like you did a great job of sticking with it and following through despite equipment issues.

[Bunchies95]

I try not to clean mags at the range if I don't have to. I bring 10 mags to every match and if I drop a mag in the dirt I decomission the mag for the day and clean/relube it when I get home.

If I did that shooting Production, I would have to bring 50 mags to the match . Somehow I don't think that is practical (or cheap).

It was good shooting with you. I learned quite a bit watching you rock and roll. Thanks for the advice on my mag springs as well.

[CHA-LEE]

I try not to clean mags at the range if I don't have to. I bring 10 mags to every match and if I drop a mag in the dirt I decomission the mag for the day and clean/relube it when I get home.

If I did that shooting Production, I would have to bring 50 mags to the match . Somehow I don't think that is practical (or cheap).

It was good shooting with you. I learned quite a bit watching you rock and roll. Thanks for the advice on my mag springs as well.

It was good shooting with you as well. As for decommissioning mags while shooting production or L10 I can totally understand that not being a viable option. But in Limited I am only dumping one mag per stage so it works for me.

[thermobollocks]

I wipe them on my pants and smack them upside down a bit. If I'm in Raton I have to do that a little more vigorously.

[CHA-LEE]

This past Saturday I did my duty as Match Director by putting on the HPPS match. We setup 6 stages to shoot and fun was had by all. As always these days are a boat load of work with getting to the range super early and setting up the stages then making sure everything is going smooth during the match. But its all worth the effort when I see the smiles on the shooters faces after the match.

Since I really can’t focus on my own shooting during this match I decided to use it as a test bed for a couple of things. First, I switched over to a full 9lb recoil spring as my modified 8.5lb one was starting to produce failure to lock up issues. The 9lb recoil spring produces a little bit of front sight dipping low motion when the slide snaps back forward but gripping the gun hard eliminates that. So I focused on gripping the gun hard through the whole match and it functioned without issue and the sight tracked properly. The second thing I tested out was using the silicone sprayed magazines. I purposefully reused the same magazine on 4 different stages to see if the lubrication would wear out after being used excessively and it didn’t which is a good thing. I didn’t experience any feeding issues like I did at the Oil Field Match so I think the use of the silicone spray is a solid solution to the issue. The one thing that sucked is how dirty it was to handle the rounds on the dropped magazine after my stage runs. I had to use a towel to wipe down the rounds to get all of the dust and sand off of the silicone lubed rounds and my fingers got really dirty. I think I am going to have to keep a pair of gloves in my range bag to handle the ammo after shooting a stage to keep my hands from getting super dirty while reworking mags. It sucks to deal with dirty stuff at the range like this, but it sucks less than having jams in the middle of a stage run so I am going to have to live with it.

I was able to produce a decent performance on each stage. I didn’t have any super awesome stage runs, but they were all consistently decent. The only shooting penalty issue I had for the day was on a double stack of paper targets with a no shoot in between. I mashed the second shot and it went right into the head of the no shoot. The funky thing is that it was my last shot of the stage and I knew that I mashed it and it probably went into the no shoot but I didn’t make it up. I had already brought the gun down and it was too late to make up the shot. This match had several difficult shots so I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to rack up a miss or no shoot. Surprising to me, my match performance was still good enough to produce a high overall finish. That was a surprise as several of the field courses were way more Open gun friendly verses Limited. Surprise win or not, I will take it.

The scheduled match on Sunday was canceled due to it being Easter Sunday. It sucks to have a local match canceled but it is what it is. I was actually able to sleep in and get a lot of stuff done around the house on Sunday so it was not a wasted day.

[CHA-LEE]

Last night I shot the indoor USPSA match down in Colorado Springs. I used this match to test some more stuff out. I reused the same three magazines the whole night so this was a good test of the silicone spray to see how it would hold up. The spray retained its lubrication so that was good, but dropping the same mag on the concrete floor multiple times through the night caused the feed lips to get too wide and I ended up with a strange failure to chamber jam on one of the practice runs between stages. After seeing how wide the feed lips were spread it wasn’t a surprise that it had the jam. I decommissioned that magazine for the last stage run of the match so I wouldn’t run into the jam issue again. Other than that, the magazines and gun ran as it should which was nice.

When I was in Texas for the Oil Field Classic I picked up a new holster hanger setup made by Shockbottle called “The Boss”. This holster setup uses the standard Blade-Tech kydex holster body but mates it to an adjustable hanger setup made of aluminum. Since I am a confessed holster junky and like fiddling on things I couldn’t resist getting it so I could try it out.

The new hanger setup allows you to adjust holster up and down, and cant it forward or backwards. You can also adjust the distance the holster is away from your body. The one thing that you can’t adjust right out of the bag is the twisting angle of the holster towards or away from your body. But the simple hanger design allowed me to get around the twisting angle limitation pretty easy by using some washers in between the holster body and hanger mount. It took me a little bit of trial and error fiddling to get the gun at an optimal position and angle. Much to my surprise the optimal position and angle was only slightly different than my existing blade-tech DOH setup. The only difference was a minimal amount of increased canting backwards which puts the back strap of the grip at the perfect angle to meet the palm of my strong hand evenly. I did a bunch of back to back dry firing with the new holster setup and my old one and noticed two primary differences. The first is an advantage in that the aluminum hanger makes the holster a lot more secure and stiff in its location which minimizes holster movement while you draw. This leads to a lot smoother and consistent removal of the gun from the holster in varying start and body positions. The stiffness of the hanger is also its number one flaw. Its stiff and does not deflect easily when crouching deeply, such as shooting through a really low port. The flexible Blade-Tech DOH setup will simply bend out of the way in these deep crouch scenarios. Is “The Boss” holster any better or worse than the old Blade-Tech DOH setup? It doesn’t seem like it is at this point, but I still need to see how it works out at the range wearing it for an extended amount of time. I can tell up front that I don’t think there will be any marked performance advantage over the old one since I ended up with basically the same position and angle of the gun. But maybe that needs to change to make it better?

I decided to run “The Boss” holster at the indoor match Monday night and it seemed to work the same as my old one. I really didn’t notice anything earth shattering better while using it during the match. But the one thing that I did notice is that I started feeling the weight of the gun dig into my hip were the base of the hanger rests against my hip. It wasn’t hurting me, but it wasn’t 100% comfortable either. If the weight of the hanger digging into my hip was noticeable during a 3 hour match it will be interesting to see what happens when I wear it all day long during a normal outdoor match. I am planning on giving it a go again on Saturday for the outdoor match to see if it reveals some type of significant advantage over my old holster. But I am still going to bring my old one along just in case the digging into my hip gets to be too much. At a minimum I got a chance to try out a new holster setup and it allowed me to revaluate the position and angle of the gun to optimize its position. Even if it may not prove to be an advantage over the old one it should still serve as a functionally equivalent backup holster if need for that duty. That is more than I can say for most of the other fail boat “Race” holsters I have laying around in my man cave.

[ZackJones]

Interesting feedback about the Boss hanger. I picked one up and will use it this weekend at the steel challenge match. In my dry fire practice this week I haven't noticed any issues with it but then again I typically don't squat down when practicing draws .

[Vanniek71]

I shot my limited setup in Boulder a few weeks ago (semi disaster- since all I know is production lol) and noticed the hanger made my hip sore too. Not a BOSS, but almost the same hanger setup. I took a little foam and stuck it to the back of it where it contacts my leg, seemed to help.

[CHA-LEE]

I did some more fiddling on "The Boss" Holster last night. I replaced the button head screws on the back side of the hanger where it touches your hip/leg with some counter sunk ones so the head of the screw is flush with the aluminum plate. This seemed to eliminate some of the "Digging in" feeling on my hip while dry firing. I was wearing jeans though, which are quite a bit thicker than my normal shooting pants. I am going to do a dry fire session with my normal shooting pants tonight and see how it feels. Either way I am going to run the new holster setup this weekend to see what an all day long use feels like.

[thermobollocks]

Got a yoga mat, cabinet liner, or thick pair of socks you don't like anymore? Home Depot it up!

[CHA-LEE]

I know I can add some padding to the underside of the hanger to make it "Softer". I don't like that adding stuff to the underside will change the angle of the hanger as it lays on my hip/leg. I got it all tweaked out and aligned in its current non-padded configuration. If my recent screw changes don't improve the long term digging into the leg situation I might try to rig up some kind of padding. But I don't want to go full retard on it before giving it a good test in its current configuration first.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I was able to attend a couple of matches. On Saturday I attended the Aurora USPSA match and the weather was nice. I showed up early and setup a stage. It was a long field course with every target stand having a vertical double stack of shoot targets with a no shoot in between. The stage also had a double stacked swinger that was activated by pulling a rope. I figured that we rarely activate moving targets by pulling a rope so it seemed like a fun challenge to add to the stage. They had 84 shooters for this match and this range is only limited to 4 squads so it made for a long day. I was on a good squad though and we all worked hard to keep the squad churning through the stages. I used “The BOSS” holster for this match and much to my surprise it didn’t hurt my leg after wearing it all day. I could feel the pressure of the gun against my leg more towards the end of the match but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It also didn’t get in the way while shooting the stages but we really didn’t have any deep crouching shooting positions either.

It was pretty windy that day and we were constantly battling the wind to keep the targets attached to the lath or props blowing down so that added some extra time to the day. Lots of dust was blowing around so my gun was filled with sand and dirt by the end of the match. But it was sunny and about 75 degrees so it was a nice day at the range. The only minor equipment issue I had was on the last stage of the day. When I was shooting the stage I could feel each round clunking up the feed ramp as the slide cycled. It didn’t jam, but it was on the verge of having a nose dive jam. I was using a magazine that I had used on several other stages so the silicone lube was probably wearing out. I think that the followers I am using are simply worn out on the sides and that is causing too much friction between the follower and the inside of the magazine. When I got home after the match I replaced all of my followers with new ones and would have a chance to test it out on Sunday evening. I also gave my fun a detailed strip and clean to get all of the dust and sand out of it.

I wasn’t totally happy with my match performance on Saturday. I didn’t have any major disasters, but I did have several minor issues. That and I wasn’t mentally into it for a couple of the stage runs which lead to shooting and moving less aggressively than I should have. Sometimes I have a “Ho Hum” unmotivated attitude during a club match and this was one of those days.

I was suppose to present a training class on Sunday but the weather took a turn for the worse on Sunday. We went from sunny and 75 degrees on Saturday to Rainy and 40 degrees on Sunday. It was also super windy on Sunday with 35+ mph winds at the range I was going to do the class at. It sucks to have to cancel a training class but it was for the best as battling the weather and wind would have been horrible out at the range.

Sunday evening I attended an indoor match at a new USPSA club formed at the Centennial Gun Club in Denver. This is a new range that just opened up at the start of the year and they hosted their first official USPSA match on Sunday. I have been helping the crew get the USPSA club off the ground by answering a bunch of questions and getting them setup to use PractiScore. They have put in a ton of work to get the club started and it was nice to see them succeed at hosting their first match. They setup four stages, two field courses and two standards style stages. The stages were fun and challenging. The lighting inside this range was pretty low so seeing your sights was a big time challenge. On most of the stages I had to revert to point shooting because seeing the sights was not going to happen. But my main goal for this match was to test out my mags after replacing the followers so I really didn’t care that I couldn’t see my sights very well. I used the same three mags the whole match and two of them were the ones that were giving me the clunky feeding on Saturday. During this match, all of the mags produced flawless smooth feeding without any issues. So I think that my feeding issues have been finally resolved by replacing the followers. As for my match performance, it was ok from an execution perspective. I was shocked that I only had one miss for the match as I did a TON of point shooting. I really expected to have more misses but got lucky this time. I was using the Force to will my hits onto the targets and some how it worked. Maybe my Jedi point shooting skills are improving? Or maybe I should go buy a powerball ticket for being super lucky last night? I think I will go buy a powerball ticket

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended the Cowtown Classic match in Cresson Texas. I attended this match last year and decided to come back again this year along with bringing a small contingent of fellow Colorado shooters. All together there were five of us from Colorado in attendance. We got to the range on Friday and checked out all of the stages. The majority of the stages were large field courses with a couple of small stages thrown into the mix. All of the stages used the IPSC Turtle style targets and most of them were fully open with only a few having hard cover here or there. There wasn’t a single No Shoot in the whole match, which I thought was a little odd, but we can live without the White Guys every once in a while right? Another interesting feature on every stage was steel. There was steel on every single stage along with moving targets on most of the stages which made for some difficult shooting on quite a few of the stages.

Most of the stages had multiple choices in starting positions and multiple stage plans that could be used. This gave the shooters a lot of choices to make on which stage navigation or target engagement order plan would be the best. Even though many of the stages had multiple options in how to shoot or move through them the vast majority of the time the different options really didn’t have a clear advantage or disadvantage over one way verses another because you were still forced to basically go to all of the different shooting positions and engage the same difficulty of target anyway. The other thing that was a little odd is that pretty much all of the stages required a position to position “Run-Stop-Shoot, Run-Stop-Shoot” style of shooting. There were very few targets in the whole match that you could effectively shoot on the move verses engaging them as you settled into or leaving stationary shooting position. Since every stage essentially forced the shooter to go to every shooting position anyway, even though there were options, they really were not options. This combined with the basically the same target array to engage in most of the shooting positions made for the same shooting skills being tested over and over through the whole match. The stages in this match predominantly tested your ability to get into a stationary shooting position and engage an easy, medium, and hard target from that position. Then simply repeat that same process 3 – 5 times on each stage. Even though there were 12 different stages, it really felt like shooting the same stage over and over because the shooting challenge was basically the same on every stage. Regardless of me liking the stages or not, it is what it is and they need to get shot to the best of my ability.

Overall I felt that I had a below average match performance. My gun and mags worked with the new silicone lube, which was awesome. I also didn’t rack up any shooting penalties which was also great. But I did manage to collect 16 D-Zone hits for the match which is horrible, but better than having 16 misses I guess. Much to my surprise even though I had an astronomical amount of D-zone hits I was still able to collect 93.5% of the available points. The number one issue I had at this match was shooting the small steel plates without needing a bunch of extra shots. There was steel on every single stage and these little plates were everywhere and usually at distances just outside of my comfort zone for shooting them aggressively. I was trying to shoot them aggressively and ended up mashing the crap out of the trigger this whole match. This resulted in a crap ton of extra shots needed on the steel. I probably gave away at least 6 – 8 seconds combined in misses on steel at this match, which is horrible. At one point during the match I thought that my rear sight might have drifted again and my POI was off. I was able to go to one of the stages I already shot that wasn’t in use to shoot a group. The stage RO graciously let me shoot a group on a 20 yard target and sure enough the rounds are going exactly where I am aiming and pressing off clean shots. So blaming the sights on my poor steel shots wasn’t an option. It was 100% mashing of the trigger causing my steel agony. Looks like I have found a new shooting challenge to practice the next time I get some Live Fire practice time.

When all of the scores were tallied I ended up second overall in Limited at 95% of Paul Clark Jr. Paul shot a very solid and clean match himself for a much deserved win. Fellow Colorado shooter Nick Brazzale finished 8^th in Limited as well. Having three Colorado shooters in the top 10 of Limited at this match was pretty cool. Even though I didn’t perform as well as I wanted to I had fun shooting and visiting with friends over the weekend. Hopefully my shooting schedule allows me to attend this match again next year.

I wasn’t able to get any of my stage runs on video at this match. I totally forgot about it on the first couple of stages and by then I had lost interest in videoing my stage runs. I am going to make it a priority to video my stage runs at the Area 1 match in a couple of weeks.