Roving Shooter Visit to Camp Perry - Report 4

Subject: The 20's are done

Shot the last of the 20 shot matches today and blew my chance of a 200 dropping the last shot, the X count was a bit low with only 6 I think but it still keeps my aggregate up. It was a high scoring day for three of the relays with 200.12 to 14 being the score you needed to make the final shoot off. The third relay of the day copped some wind associated with some passing weather, the forecast was for thunder storms this afternoon, which did not happen but we could see the system going across the lake. Tomorrow is the final day of the individual long ranges with the Palma match of 15 shots at 8, 9 and 1000. I have no squading for this as it is done on the range, at 7 am, no less. Looks like an early start, and I hope I don't draw 1st to shoot as the sighting is a bit ugly early, we have not generally been shooting till 8:45 so the start shooting time of 8 will be quite a bit darker as the sun is behind the targets and they have a fawn colour to their "white".

I was wrong the other day about the calibre other than .308 in the Palma rifle category but they do shoot the heavier bullets. There is not much advantage to them in the conditions that I have seen, so far.

The finals which are held using the top scorer in each category are good to watch and the scores that are shot are impressive. In the any rifle class today, off the elbows with scopes or iron sights, the winner, John Widden, shot 100.7, and the runner up shot 100.6. The top Palma rifle "only" had a 99.5. The service rifle shooter won with a 99 too, this is a military semi auto rifle at 1000 yards. The winners are often from The Army Marksmanship unit, with Emil Presalik as its head coach. He is also the US Palma team head coach. There are shooting teams here from army, army reserve, national guard, marine corp, and some navy, as well as the likes of Remington. The service rifle categories are strongly contested between them but they also compete in the other classes. The civilian marksmanship programme is also very well supported and sponsored.

Malcolm

Sent from Yahoo! Mail for iPad