February 11th, 2017

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ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS 

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Wow the great weather doesn’t get any better than this. This the time of year when the desert starts to turn green, and the wildlife begins to come alive.    Today’s match started with some champions coming in from out of state. Dough an Vipha Miller, from California, Greg Suave, and Mike Niksch from Colorado. Some long distances driven there to join us. We had 18 competitors today.  Setup began on Friday by Garrett making sure everything was going smoothly.   Today we witnessed a new era in FT… the “brigade”.  In FT, it has it’s fair share of “life experienced” shooters. Some of those shooters may be challenged by the physical demands of the range. Well, now we have shooters that have taken the lead from Allen and have bought scooters for the sport!  Way to go!! Keep the dream alive!!  Dave debuted  his new scooter, (wait for it) that  matches his car’s paint job!   Yes folks … it’s true.   This thing is slick.  Brand spanking new.  Next month, I heard Larry might be joining us with his new scooter.  

 The match started at its normal time of 9:30. We had a real good cross section of shooting classes this round. Everything but WFTF spring.  We shot ten lanes, three targets per lane, and that translates to 60 shots. We had one Forced Standing target at 23 yards with a 1.5 inch KZ, and one Forced Kneeling at 17 yards with a 1.75 inch KZ.   The Match Troyer was calculated at 27.5, which is considered the middle-upper end of “moderate” difficulty.   After polling of the shooters, everyone felt the course was a bit easy, and wanted to see some greater challenge.  Despite this, nobody cleaned the course. Doug came the closest, and scored a 57 in Open, and Mike scored a 55 in WFTF!  Wayne took Hunter with a score of 51, and Scott in Unlimited with a score of 49.  Great shooting!   The crux of most of those are the real close shots and the real far ones, of course.  Next match, we will step up the game, and bring in a slight increase in challenge. After running the numbers and looking at the stats, it appears the harder targets were definitely the closer ones. We had one target failure, pulled it, and awarded everyone the points for that.  It failed to be knocked down with the low FPE of the WFTF power at that distance.  Fun, long, day.  Thanks to Dave for help setting up, and to Wayne for help cleaning up.