2012 competition calendar

Living where I do out in the middle of nowhere means it's hard to get to competitions. My commitment as training officer for the local Air Cadet squadron also cuts into weekends and training time but it's a worthy trade-off.

That said, here are the competitions I marked on the family calendar for the 2012 season:

• February 5, Indoor Match, Winnipeg
• March 4, Indoor Match, Winnipeg
• April 1, Indoor Match, Winnipeg
• May 12-13, ISSF Outdoor Match, Winnipeg
• June 10, ISSF Outdoor Match, Winnipeg
• July 7-8, Provincial Smallbore Rifle Championships, Winnipeg
• July 15, NRA Conventional 1600 Match, Minneapolis, MN - Tentative
• August 10-12, Canadian National Smallbore Rifle Championships, Beachberg
• August 25-26, NRA 3200 Conventional State Championship Match, Hibbing, MN - Tentative

The sad news is that I don't know if I'll be able to make it south to any NRA matches this summer. A couple of them overlap with matches in Winnipeg, and since I'm going to the nationals this summer I'd prefer to focus on ISSF matches. Traveling to Winnipeg is both quicker and cheaper than Minneapolis, but the state championships in Hibbing are only a couple hours' drive south of me so I'm hoping to make it this year.

This crazy early spring also means an early return to the outdoor range for me, as this time last year we still had two feet of snow on the front lawn. I love shooting outdoors when there aren't any mosquitoes, but my bear scare last summer still kind of freaks me out. I'm not sure if I want to try shooting 50 metres in the backyard but we'll see -- it would sure make getting in quality training much easier.

March match performance

583!

That score might not sound like much to other prone shooters, but it's the first time I've broken 580 in any competition since I started training again in 2009. So it was a happy ride home for everyone.

The match didn't start off so well, though -- last weekend I had moved my scope forward in its clamp so it wasn't so back-end heavy but I must've changed the angle of the eyepiece at the same time. When I got down this morning I couldn't see through it at all and had to break position to find a screwdriver and rotate it back up.

This wasted about 10 minutes, leaving me with only 20 minutes. So I fired two sighters and moved onto score and finished with thirty seconds to spare and ended up with solid 195:

That seemed a good way to start the match!

My second target was much more relaxed. After firing three sighters to get settled, I moved onto score and around the target in good time, finishing in about 20 minutes. I had one bobble when I moved my head between shot pairs, but other than that I was pleased with target #2:

After my experiences last weekend at the cadet match, I decided to look over all of my targets with my overlay and found myself a point that the scorers missed on diagram 9 on target #2:

Hmm, looks in to me. . . .

Before I started the third target, I moved my cheek piece down a smidge because my front sight seemed to be rising in my sight picture. I think it was because I was relaxing and the rifle was settling but I'm waiting for some coaching feedback and will let everyone know what might've been going on as I'm not sure. So long as I didn't move my head between shot pairs, though, everything stayed nice and tight:

So all in all, I'm pleased with my performance. I was still fighting the "good enough" voice every now and again, usually near the end of each target. I told myself that it only took 10 seconds to reset the shot and that I didn't drag my family all this way to not do my best, and so rejected quite a few shots.

Here's my diary entry for the match.

I'll set up the video camera for the next couple of sessions to watch my head position and to see if I can see the rifle settling/slipping down the longer I'm in position. Other than the funny sight picture, my position felt stable, my NPA seemed (mostly) spot on and my confidence was strong.

April is looking to be a busy month, but I'm really hoping to make it back and continue to build on my success to date. Stay tuned!

Giving back to the sport

My training has been sidelined for the last week thanks to the full-blown arrival of a vicious head cold and some other commitments of mine -- namely coaching my local air cadet squadron's marksmanship team.

Cadet marksmanship training is split between traditional position shooting and biathlon. Every cadet unit (air, army and sea) in Canada is issued with Daisy 853C .177 cal. air rifles (we have nine), a box of decent match pellets and folding target stands. Since the rifles are tuned to fire under 500 fps, they aren't classified as firearms and units are free to conduct training wherever they can find the space.

This past Saturday I was up before dawn to chauffeur our team to the Stage 2 Zone Match. The course of fire for the match is very straightforward: each member of the five-person team shoots four targets for a total score out of 400 (each shot being scored out of 10). The top four individual scores are used to calculate the overall team score, which in this case is out of 1600.

Cadets are allowed to use shooting jackets, slings, gloves and hats, but not every unit has the money to buy this equipment so the disparity in scores between "have" and "have not" units is usually significant. The targets themselves are dimensionally identical to ISSF air rifle targets except that the 10 dot is about twice as big.

But back to the match! Our challenge this year was that our only Range Safety Officer (RSO) was frequently away for work. This made training almost impossible, and aside from two practices in the weeks leading up to the competition, no one really had time to prepare for the competition. Three of our five competitors had never even fired on a scoring target before the match!

I wasn't sure what to expect from the team, but I told them to try hard and have fun and we'd go home happy regardless. I'm pleased to say that our performance once again outstripped our (lack of ) preparation! We finished second on the day with a team total score of 1274/1600 and our two veteran shooters finished second and third individually and one of our newbies was the second high junior.

This was a great performance for so little training! Our two veterans have almost certainly earned themselves a trip to the Stage 3 Regional Match in mid-April and our junior will most likely be going with them. And looking at last year's cut scores as a guide, there's a better than 50% chance that the entire team will advance as a wildcard, too!

I've been trying to get on the cadet RSO course for several years now but have always been bumped -- as a civilian instructor, I'm automatically pushed to the bottom of the list. This drives me nuts, because I can't help but wonder how amazingly well the squadron could do in these competitions if I was able to run the range myself and hold more than two or three practices before the Stage 2 match.

So now we have to wait until mid-March to find out who, and how many, of our shooters will advance to the Stage 3 match. This is a big deal, as the Stage 3 winners move on to the national match in mid-May. Getting to go the nationals means a trip to Quebec City (last year it was in Whitehorse) and a week off school.

I wasn't honestly expecting anyone to qualify for Stage 3 because of the lack of practice, but I guess I should block off that weekend on the family calendar. I also need to break out my "Ways of the Rifle" book because standing scores will count toward the overall rankings at Stage 3 and none of my cadets have had any serious training in standing. It should be a fun eight weeks!

Video, Take #2

I was finally able to get my CURT trainer going again earlier this week and decided to give it another try yesterday.

In response to some great feedback on my earlier video, I recorded two strings of ten shots while I shot them on the CURT. These videos show my face side-on, making it easier to monitor my cheek placement (and pressure) on the stock.

But in between sessions, I had a bit of an epiphany prompted by some tips provided by Larry Sawyer in the MRRA's Spring 2012 newsletter: while I always checked my Natural Point of Aim (NPA) for left-to-right, I almost never checked it for vertical displacement. Coach Sawyer specifically warns against using your breath to control elevation -- which I almost always do.

Is this something that I've never done, or did I just forget about it? It seems so obvious to me now I wonder why I haven't been doing it. I usually set up with the target at the bottom of the rear sight on full exhale, and use my diaphragm to come up onto it. Whoops!

So my goals for this session was to: (1) Keep my cheek pressure constant by not lifting my head between shots and (2) Focus on both vertical and lateral NPA on full exhale. I wanted to see if these would reduce the amount of vertical stringing I've been seeing recently.

Here's a video of the first string of 10 shots -- sorry for the background noise and music, my wife was reading on the couch next to me:



It looks like I need to move my lens up some as it's not centred on the rear aperture. This group wasn't so hot, but I'm not sure why as everything felt good.

Here's the second round of 10 shots:



This was better, although still pretty loose. I was looking at some of my earliest CURT groups from 2009 and they're tiny -- these are pretty rotten in comparison.

Maybe I've "relearned" too much since I started training again? I still need to get my eyes checked out but I don't think my prescription has changed. It's darker downstairs than it is outside, and that may be contributing to group size.

My next session I'm going to focus on these two goals again and see if the groups tighten up anymore.

Anschutz 100th anniversary video

I stumbled upon a cool video on YouTube made back in 1956 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Anschutz. It's in German and black and white -- no subtitles -- but still very cool.



I wonder how long they used those machines to make rifles? I know some of the best rifling machines are almost 100 years old.