Area 3 Championship

I went to the Area 3 Championship this year in Grand Island at their public range there. They did a great job, especially for such a new club, and running the logistics of a public range couldn’t have been easy. Really, they have a beautiful range there.

The stages were well put together and a ton of fun to shoot. I do have to say though, 14 stages in one day is just a bit much, it really is. On RO day we shot from about 9:30 to 6:30-7:00 and still had one stage to shoot in the morning. Other squads and four and five stages to shoot the next day. Yikes.

Before I go on, Sabumnim was nice enough to film me shooting and put together this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFgnIUCq_qU

You see stage 8 there? That one there with the two ropes you had to pull, I bet you’re wondering why I holstered and ran backwards? Well, that falling target up front was FAST, seriously fast, I couldn’t even get one shot on it, so I had to go back to get the rope to pull it back up—there were no disappearing targets for the match. Well, those ropes had A LOT of slack in them. I had to lean all the way over that rail to get the ropes and pass them between my hands to get all the slack out. I was just too short to do it one handed, and I couldn’t think of a way to do that safely without holstering. So I did. It wasn’t random. :)

There were a lot of stages with weird things like that throughout the match, the “doctor bag” stage, one where you attatched yourself to a line to shoot strong hand only (the one I missed a shot on), etc. You can see it on the video! I personally like things like that, but some people don’t.

I was standing too high a lot of the time-- okay pretty much all of the time. So, that’s something to work on. Also, I don’t always make a plan. I get tired or frustrated with myself and it makes my shooting suffers. I have started doing a weird thing with my grip, putting my weak hand thumb up, but not my strong hand, which results in an overlap and thus a gap. Need to work on that two. On the plus side, I have gotten faster, my new sites have helped me a lot, and I haven’t lost any accuracy!

For the match I had 12 Deltas and 1 Mike. The rest were Alphas and Charlies (302 and 53 respectively). In that way not a bad match. I really wanted to shoot the match clean, with no Mikes, Procedurals, or No Shoots, but I still think I did really well.

I won 2nd D class. :)