Went to the NTSA 10m Airgun match this sunday. Wasn’t expecting much, in fact I was mostly there to get the DURC Squad and gear to and from the range, but shot the match for practise and evaluation anyway. Had time to get prepared, but ran into time problems right off the bat. Sighting took far too long, nearly 25 minutes. The new backboard over the targets in the UCD range does not do good things to your sight picture.
Still, it wasn’t a complete failure. The final string was appalling, but it was shot inside of eight minutes; far, far too fast. Had I had another five or six minutes, I could have posted a better score – one without that disasterous flier of a seven at least. A score at the average I’d been at up to that point (95), would have given me a 571 which would have beaten my previous personal best by two points. So I need to work on my shot rythym. But at least I know what to work on!
The position felt stable throughout, and my physical fitness lasted the course, which I was actually surprised by as I was a little tired at the start of the match. I would have had enough to shoot a good finals, but I’d have had to have slept a little first. Wasn’t going to happen though, as I had to be elsewhere for the day. I did qualify for the finals, in sixth place overall. Several shooters opted not to shoot, however, so the finals line was a little empty (I still think that for club-level shoots like this, the next highest ranked shooter should be invited to shoot, for the sake of experience if nothing else – finals are most interesting to those who’ve shot in them).
My thumb’s still acting up after the match, so I’m not going to train on Monday, and only lightly if at all on Tuesday. Wednesday’s going to be a combination of working on the shot rythym and some technical work with the rifle, checking how far clicks on the sights move the fall of shot with this new sight radius, and maybe doing some rudimentary batch testing to see if the 4.50mm pellets I’m using give a better or worse group than the other sizes (4.49,4.51,4.52mm).