Monthly Meet – October 2024 – Shadows & Bats

by John White
October 26, 2024

Today was an incredible nice day with blue skies and just a little breeze. Unlike several of our shoots of late this year with rain, winds, hurricanes, tornados oh my. The weather started off cool so a fire was started in our firing to knock the chill off and by 10:30 it was warming up nicely to a long sleeve day in the 70’s.

So we met on our primitive Range B. We started the registration as always with sign in beginning at 8.30am. The course of fire description and safety briefing started at 9:00am with 20 shooters, 2 newbies and 4 admin guests non shooters!

We had our two shooting categories, off hand and bench, to compete in classifications for fairness. We do not want to exclude anyone who wants to shoot with us but we will not compete against centerfire or scopes to be fair. Heck, bring your gun to work on and shoot. Two did today.

We shot two relays, 10 shots each, patch and roundball, any caliber in these two shooting classifications. The classifications will not compete against each other for prizes.

First Relay:
10 shots at 50 yards. We shot a vampire carrying a poor hapless victim. Not sure if everyone’s roundball were properly cast with a tad of silver dipped in garlic and holy water. Now someone thought garlic would work against a master vampire. Nope! And their score reflected it.

Second Relay:
10 shots at 25 yards, we were looking for a bat target but settled for the NMLRA 6 bull target as it was as close to bats as the program guy could find.

Both relays were added together for placement within the appropriate shooting category off hand or benchrest for ranking of results.

Our shoot results were:
Off Hand:
1st – Jim Gravely
2nd – Bob Wilson
3rd – Billy Townsend
4th – Erik Rolle

Bench:
1st – Charlie Russel
2nd – Steve B.
3rd – Doug Burgess
4th – Mike Lamb

With 18 veteran shooters we did have a few fail to fires, sights acting wonky, and one of our newbies who has never shot BP actually dry-balled. Could that be as a result of disrespecting the BP spirits this time of the year, orientating your pillow ticking stripes top to bottom rather than side to side, not sacrificing a tin of caps by and forming a circle and repeating the poem called, Ode to a Dry Ball? They were very odd and hard to explain events. We were done in two hours. Scored, cleaned up.

So we look forward to everyone coming and shooting with us Saturday, November 16th by 9:00am for our final shoot of the year. We do not shoot during the holidays so as to not interfere with family plans. If you have any questions please holler as I am sure we all have ’em.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures below and the video at the end. Be sure to leave a comment if you’re so inclined.

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