Broome County Sportsmens Association Air Rifle Field Target  

Saturday October 13

BCSA October 13th, 2018 Match Report

The early forecast for this month’s match (our last match of 2018) was looking pretty good……BUT…..as match day got closer, the forecast got worse. 4 of the major websites said the rain would clear out by around 9:00am so I decided to delay the match for 1 hour so we could stay dry………Nope….that didn’t happen! We had light rain through most of the match with a few breaks of sunshine. The wind was present and variable with windspeeds in the 5 - 8 mph range. Oh, and the temperature NEVER broke 50 degrees! A far cry from the upper 80’s we had at the Nationals just last week in North Carolina!

My wife Pat and I arrived early to get things finished up. We pulled the strings in the rain and kept wondering why we were doing this. Shortly after the course was set we went to set up the sight-in range. Louis Hopewell was the first to arrive and lent us a hand finishing that up. The competitors for the day started to arrive. We ended up with 12 brave souls for the day that were gonna shoot no matter what Mother Nature had in store.

Hector Medina surprised us by joining us for the day and he even brought along a few spectators! They were in the area and he “heard there was a Field Target Match”. It was great to see Veronika after such a long hiatus and also meet the kids! Hector chose to shoot Hunter Piston and I chose to shoot WFTF PCP…….just a little switcheroo!

While we were sighting-in under the cover of our 100 yard rifle range, I kept watching the rain to see if it was going to give us a break so we could make our way to the Field Target range. I ran sight-in a little long then we made the trek over to start the match.

For this month’s match, Pat and I just randomly placed the targets without measuring them. It was going to be interesting to see how we did. We had 6 groups of 2. The squads were Hans Apelles and Rosalie Paulsen, Brian Vanliew and Glenn Thomas, Dave Lee and Nic Gregoris, Paul Manktelow and Hector Medina, Craig Evans and Louis Hopewell and finally Nathan Thomas and I were paired up as we were at the Nationals. Both Hector and I used our range finders and ranged the targets after we shot in order to determine the course difficulty for the day. We didn’t do too bad with our random setup, We had 15 of the 30 targets beyond 40 yards and with 1 standing and 1 kneeling lane we ended up with a 35.54T.

The match went on without a single issue. I was worried with all the rain we had over night that there might be a few issues, but no cold lines! Now, the only problem we did have was that Nathan and I concluded that we should never be squadded together again!! Shooting together doesn’t help our score!

As we finished up the 10 lane 60 shot match, the competitors for the day handed their cards in to Pat and Paul’s wife Janet…..Thank you ladies for all the record keeping! After all the scores were checked and finalized, we handed out the awards. The pistol match was to commence after the awards, BUT, after the cold day we were dealing with many decided to head for home and some warmth so the match was nixed. There were a few of us that re-shot the rifle targets with different equipment just for fun and Paul Manktelow brought out his new acquisition that he won at the Nationals to show and shoot. Nathan shot my EV2 and just kept shaking his head at how much easier it was to shoot than his LGU. Nic shot a HW97 playing around in WFTF Piston and I shot my TM1000 testing it and the newly mounted Hawke FFP scope I got. Brian and Glenn took some shots with the different equipment also. It was just a nice little plinking session to end the season!

At the conclusion of the pistol match……I mean plinking session, the remaining people jumped in and helped with the teardown. Thanks ALL!!!

Thanks to all that came out to BCSA this year to make it a great season! Hope to see you and many more new/old faces in 2019!

The Pictures from Saturday’s match can be seen here: