.......Made The Team -- WOO HOO !

Where has this past week gone? I've been back and forth to the range several times trying to get the 9mm. Taurus ready for competition, and It's almost there. It's working well with the lighter loads, but heavier bullets and loads and it fails to extract the casing once in a while. I suspect a new extractor and extractor spring will resolve that problem.

Yesterday afternoon was the second tryout session for the CWSA Inter-Club Match team, and they were nice enough to let me be the first shooter since I had to MC our Fishin' Club meeting at 7pm. I still wasn't too confident in the Taurus 9mm., so I tried to qualify both with the Taurus 9mm. and the Taurus Model 66 revolver. I ran through the qualifier stages (almost literally!).

The 9mm. failed to extract a couple of times shooting the 147 grain bullets at the pins, pretty much messing up the times, but it worked fine with the 115 grain plate loads. The revolver worked flawlessly, and I managed some solid but fairly conservative times overall.

The last shot string on the very last stage with the revolver was strange, to say the very least! I had missed a plate and had to come back to pick it up on the third run, so that was my "Throw-away" time, but I didn't dare make any mistakes on the fourth run. Just after firing the last shot on the third run, the red dot went from being a sharply focused 4MOA dot to a giant fuzzy dot something around 50 or 60MOA! The dot was bigger than the plates! Something had broken loose inside the sight, but I still had one crucial run of five shots to make that could mean the difference between making the team or not.

No time to change guns or swap out the sight, and even if I changed the sight it wouldn't be sighted in. My only hope was to cover each plate with the dot and hope I could see on the berm which way it was off, so I could correct my point of aim. That, of course, would only work if I could see the impact, and the dot was so big that would be unlikely! When the buzzer sounded I covered the first plate with the dot and fired, and heard a nice loud "Ding". Four more shots, four more dings! Talk about lucky! Even the time was reasonable, at least for me.

I quickly packed up, thanked everyone for letting me shoot first , then left to go take a quick shower and change clothes for the meeting. No idea how I did overall, but knew I had improved all of my times compared to the first tryout.

I made it to the Fishin' Club meeting with even a few minutes to spare! After the meeting it was home and to bed. It had been a long day............

This morning I got the official call from Al, and I had ended up third overall with the revolver, and had made the team! WOO HOO!

I ordered up a new red dot sight this morning from Natchez Shooter's Supply, and should have it Tuesday. I can mount it on Wednesday and get it sighted in, so I'll be ready to go for the Thursday afternoon team practice. I've got a new extractor, spring, and pin for the 9mm. on the way by Fedex, so that should be here on Tuesday.

When I finish this post I'm off to the range for some rimfire practice as tomorrow is a CWSA hanging plate match, and since I've been shooting everything BUT rimfire all week, I'm sure I've messed up my rimfire technique something awful!

In between all of this I've been working, and getting things set up for the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. I'll have more announcements and surprises soon on the Rendezvous, but suffice it to say that if you miss this event, you are going to kick yourself until next October. It's gonna be a ball!

If I didn't waste so much time sleeping, eating, and working, I could just about get everything done........