Zak Smith
Member
This is Zak's first person account of the 2004 Rocky Mountain 3Gun Match.
Background
First, you might want to check out my report from the 2003 RM3GM. It has details about the NRA Whittington Center and contains a full report of all of last year's stages.
Wednesday Arrival
I arrived at the NRA Whittington Center at about 2pm on Wednesday and checked in. Raton has had much much more precipitation this year than recent years, so the whole environment was transformed by the flora compared to last year. Strong thunderstorms rolled through the Whittington Center every day of the match around 4-6pm, and temperatures were moderate to cool, as opposed to the sweltering heat of last year's match.
The general outline of the match was: 8 stages, three Thursday, three Friday, and two Saturday. There were 16 squads of approximately 8 shooters each. Each squad shot one time slot, and had one time slot's worth of downtime before the next stage. I was on squad 8, starting on stage 8. Some others in my squad included: Curt Monnig (Trijicon), Ron Adams, Darrell Humphrey, John Sternberg, Kelly Neal, and Stewart Lewis.
In addition to the main match, there were two side-matches: the machinegun match run by Alan Samuel of MachinegunTours, and a long-range precision match run by Mike Kolar.
[ link to larger image ]
[ link to larger image ]
Thursday
Stage 8: Shotgun.
[ link to larger image ]
We started off on stage 8 Thursday morning at 7:30AM, after the shooters' briefing. There were five shooting positions from which a 40-50 yard IPSC-target-sized steel plate had to be engaged with slugs. There were four plates to engage first, and then 16 other clay pigeons throughout the course. No slugs could be loaded into the shotgun until the four small plates were engaged. Unless the shooter was careful to load slugs and engage the targets in the right order, a lot of birdshot would have to be racked out to select load slugs.
My strategy was to load a slug into my Benelli's tube with one pigeon left to shoot before the slug target, so that I wouldn't waste any rounds. It's also faster to load one into the tube than to rack a round out and load through the ejection port. My run went according to plan with no misses and no loading screwups. Once I was done, the RO was temporarily confused by my engagement order and tried to give me a procedural on the grounds that my 5th shot was a shotshell at the next set of pigeons instead of either shooting a slug at the slug plate or shooting the shotshell into the berm. I had load a slug into the tube after the 4 small plates, then engaged on pigeon in the next array, and then shot the slug into the large slug plate. In the end, there was no procedural because there was officially no order besides that the slugs could not be loaded until the first four small plates were engaged. My time was 85.48 clean.
[ link to larger image ]
[ link to larger image ]
Background
First, you might want to check out my report from the 2003 RM3GM. It has details about the NRA Whittington Center and contains a full report of all of last year's stages.
Wednesday Arrival
I arrived at the NRA Whittington Center at about 2pm on Wednesday and checked in. Raton has had much much more precipitation this year than recent years, so the whole environment was transformed by the flora compared to last year. Strong thunderstorms rolled through the Whittington Center every day of the match around 4-6pm, and temperatures were moderate to cool, as opposed to the sweltering heat of last year's match.
The general outline of the match was: 8 stages, three Thursday, three Friday, and two Saturday. There were 16 squads of approximately 8 shooters each. Each squad shot one time slot, and had one time slot's worth of downtime before the next stage. I was on squad 8, starting on stage 8. Some others in my squad included: Curt Monnig (Trijicon), Ron Adams, Darrell Humphrey, John Sternberg, Kelly Neal, and Stewart Lewis.
In addition to the main match, there were two side-matches: the machinegun match run by Alan Samuel of MachinegunTours, and a long-range precision match run by Mike Kolar.
[ link to larger image ]
[ link to larger image ]Thursday
Stage 8: Shotgun.
[ link to larger image ]We started off on stage 8 Thursday morning at 7:30AM, after the shooters' briefing. There were five shooting positions from which a 40-50 yard IPSC-target-sized steel plate had to be engaged with slugs. There were four plates to engage first, and then 16 other clay pigeons throughout the course. No slugs could be loaded into the shotgun until the four small plates were engaged. Unless the shooter was careful to load slugs and engage the targets in the right order, a lot of birdshot would have to be racked out to select load slugs.
My strategy was to load a slug into my Benelli's tube with one pigeon left to shoot before the slug target, so that I wouldn't waste any rounds. It's also faster to load one into the tube than to rack a round out and load through the ejection port. My run went according to plan with no misses and no loading screwups. Once I was done, the RO was temporarily confused by my engagement order and tried to give me a procedural on the grounds that my 5th shot was a shotshell at the next set of pigeons instead of either shooting a slug at the slug plate or shooting the shotshell into the berm. I had load a slug into the tube after the 4 small plates, then engaged on pigeon in the next array, and then shot the slug into the large slug plate. In the end, there was no procedural because there was officially no order besides that the slugs could not be loaded until the first four small plates were engaged. My time was 85.48 clean.
[ link to larger image ]
[ link to larger image ]
