Some days are just Strange.....

More or less a nightmare.....

---

Today started out looking like it was going to be a really busy day, with some close scheduling, but it looked like everything would fit together OK. Our fishing club had a salmon BBQ and potluck scheduled for lighting the BBQ's at 10:30 am. , fish cooked by 11.00 am., and eat from 11 to 11.45.

Then we had a pin shoot at the CWSA range where the rim fire pin top classes should start after the center fire shooters were done, which was usually about 12:30 or 1pm. at the earliest.

It's a half hour drive from the BBQ to the pin shoot. We'd have to cut it Close, but it was do-able!

We got to the BBQ at 10:30 and helped get the briquettes lit for the BBQ. They didn't want to light. They'd burn a little, then go out. Tried a little more starter fluid. Same thing. Soaked the little so-n-so's in starter fluid, and they would barely burn.

After lots of fooling around with briquettes that acted like they had been soaked in fire-retardant, it was 11:30. One of the guys headed off to his place to get a propane BBQ.

By Noon the propane BBQ had not arrived, and we had barely luke-warm fresh, raw, Alaska salmon. I grabbed a couple of chocolate chip cookies, a piece of cake, KeeWee, and jumped into my Japanese go-kart/automobile and roared off for the pin shoot. Did I mention that I had skipped breakfast, figuring on pigging out at the BBQ? Travelling at something near Mach .088 or therabouts, headed for the pin shoot.

When we pulled into the parking lot, we could see that the pin top shoot was already underway. Bummer! For the first time that anyone can remember, there were so few centerfire shooters that they were done by noon. KeeWee and I had missed the sign-up, and had to watch the optical sight finals from the spectator chairs. Al, who had already won everything in centerfire, also walked away with the optical sight class in convincing manner.

Due to the low turn-out, there were only two signed up for the iron sight class, the two best pin top shooters in the club, Jim and Al. I asked them both if I could shoot too, just to get in a little shooting and expand the class a little bit, and they agreed. WOO HOO! Even though I had missed breakfast, missed out on the BBQ, and missed out on the optical sight rimfire class, I would at least get to shoot at a few pins.

Jim and Al had a battle royal, with a tie table, and then several close tables, but Al managed to squeak by Jim, after the dust had settled.

That put me up against Al, who had won everything in sight all day. And me, stomach grumbling, no warm-up, shooting my iron-sight High Standard. Iron sight, with my eyesight, is always a surprise.

To my absolute amazement, managed to narrowly win the first table! How could that happen? My stomach grumbled in dis-approval.

We moved to the second set of pin tables.

A hush fell across the crowd.

The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.......

Well, actually, not really!

The usual suspects were in the background, hollering wise-cracks, or ignoring us completely!

The buzzer sounded, and Al and I blazed away, with each of us hitting the first four pins almost at the same time. We both shot our fifth pin almost simultaneously!

Fortunately for me, I had hit my last pin slightly sooner, and it reached the ground while Al's final pin was a still couple of inches above it. It was the closest iron sight final all year, as I remember!

So what's with the picture? Well, after the regular pin shoot we decided to do a "fun shoot". Al set up the table as shown in the picture. The rules were simple. You had to shoot all of the pin tops and the shotgun shells off first, then you could shoot the big pins. You get a point for each pin shot off the table. If you knock off a big pin before you've shot off all of the pin tops and shotgun shells, you are disqualified and your score is what you have shot up to that point. Sounds simple, right? It wasn't!

The picture was taken from a bit of an angle, so you can see all the pins. From the shooting station, several of the pin tops were directly in front of the big pins. The big pins are sitting slightly over the back edge of the table, so just touching one would knock it off the table. The pin tops were the ones we'd been shooting up all day, and were full of lead, most of it off-center. When you shot them, you didn't know exactly where they would go! You could try to shoot them a little off-center, and hope they would go a bit to one side or the other, but it was anybody's guess where they might go! Nobody did very well, and no one was able to shoot all of them without knocking over a big pin.

It was all for the fun of it, anyway, so no one really cared...................