Good Bullseye match

I shot the bullseye match today at Central Jersey. It was a hot day, although we were fortunate to have a light breeze from time to time. The match finished pretty early, too. We were done shooting by 2:00 or so. We were pretty lucky -- we had all of one alibi.

After one of my slow-fire strings, John Gemmill, who was running the match (and who's one of the people responsible for reviving bullseye shooting in New Jersey), gave me some unsolicited advice. He'd noticed my pistol trembling a bit, and he advised me to try relaxing my grip on the pistol. I gave that a try on the next few strings, and, although I wasn't immediately successful at shooting better, I managed to shoot a 96 slow-fire stage on the .45 National Match course. To put this into perspective, the High Masters have been shooting 94-95 on average for .45 slow-fire stages for the past few months at Central Jersey. And to give some more perspective, my other .45 slow-fire stages were pretty pitiful, including a 66. It may have been a fluke, but I'm at least on track to improving my slow-fire scores.

The other remarkable event from the match (at least for me) was my slider. For timed- and rapid-fire stages, we use turning targets. If you manage to get a shot off while the target is turning, you'll get a hole that's stretched out a bit. In my case, the hole started about 11:00 in the 9 ring and stretched to the edge of the cardboard. The aforementioned John Gemmill commented on the target and told me that it showed good control, that I hadn't panicked when the targets started turning but had gotten the shot off calmly.

My grand aggregate for the match was 2329, which gives me my second consecutive Sharpshooter score. So, depending on how long it takes the NRA to process things and update my status, I've got a few weeks to be a sandbagger and win some Marksman matches (or get ahead of myself and start shooting poorly.) At least I've met one of my goals for the year, to make it up into Sharpshooter.