Tag Archives: bullseye

Another pistol tournament, Flushing

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Today I shot an 824-19X out of 900 at the match at the Flushing Rifle & Pistol Club. I definitely shot better than my last match, a 785 shot at Grand Rapids.

I’m still getting these crazy fliers that really sink the scores. Most of my fliers were high and right, although a few were off to the left.

Here are the targets.

Targets shot at a match in Flushing, Feb 14, 2010

The scores were 89 and 88 for slow fires. 86, 91, 94 for NMC. 96 and 91 for timed fire. 97 and 92 for rapid fire.

The slow fires were good scores for me, but the rest was too erratic. It’s those fliers. I’m shooting too fast. Some of the timed and rapid fires I probably shot in 6 or 7 seconds. I forced myself to hold the gun up for the whole rapid fire string, even though I finished shooting. I could’ve fired another 2 or 3 shots.

For the next match, I intend to hold the slow fires about where they are, but shoot nothing lower than a 95 for the rest. I’ll do that by slowing down so I can take each shot when it’s ready, so as to do away with those fliers.

Getting back into competitive pistol shooting

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Finally, I competed in a real pistol match.

Throughout the 1990s I competed regularly, but in about the last ten years I’ve competed in only one sanctioned bullseye pistol tournament. That was about three years ago. Sure, I’ve shot in some pistol leagues here and there, but it’s not quite the same.

This one was a couple weeks ago at the Grand Rapids Rifle and Pistol Club. The match was called well, the indoor range was in great shape, and it was a neat surprise that 9-time National Champion Brian Zins showed up to compete. That was cool.

At 785 of 900 possible, my own shooting was a bit of a, well, a debacle. :-) That’s an 87.2 average, for a middle-of-the-road Sharpshooter score.

I still had a good time. I really like being on the firing line, and I’ve been more driven since that match. Next time, I’ll be a bit more competitive.

I’ve been dry-firing, and in a league shoot this past Tuesday, I broke out of a 4-week rut of scattered groups and fired a 284 in a 300-point National Gallery Course. That’s a 94.67 average, which is an excellent match for me. I’d like to see that level of shooting become normal.

Pistol match, Oct 20, 2009: the good and the bad

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Last night after work I drove up to Bay City to Duncan’s Outdoors Shop to compete in a pistol league match. It’s the second one I’ve made it to, and shot some of my best…and worst scores.

National Match Course 1 Total
SF TF RF
95 91-2X 93-1X 279-3X
National Match Course 2 Total
SF TF RF
86 99-3X 92-2X 277-5X

Starting with a 95 was great. It’s been a long time since I’ve fired a 95 on a slow fire target. Maybe 10 years. There were 5 tens and 5 nines, which speaks to the consistency of the group.

As to what I did to bring about that score, all I can think of is that for each shot, I:

  • took some good deep breaths to counter a little match pressure I was feeling
  • closed my eyes, tipped my head up, and visualized what I wanted to see in the sight picture
  • during visualization, also mentally reminded myself on the grip (middle and ring fingers pushing towards me, thumb pushing towards target)

After that great target, I completely fell apart and shot a 91 in a timed fire! Yikes. I probably average a 97 in timed fires, and don’t have a record since I’ve been keeping track in June of shooting a timed fire target that low. Same story on the 92 rapid fire.

So why the low sustained fire scores? Lack of recent match experience. When I’ve been out to the range this past summer, my practices haven’t really included range commands with enforced 10 or 20 second strings.

Basically, I seem to have no confidence in my ability to know how much time I have for timed or rapid fires. I can’t think of a way to remedy this except to practice with enforced times.

So, I ordered a refurbished iPod shuffle and I’ll record range commands onto it (I already have them in iTunes) so I can play those commands to myself when I go out for practice.