World Steel Challenge - Part 3

The third stage on the schedule was "Accelerator", one I had never shot before. Shooting a particular stage a lot gets it into your muscle memory and you don't have to think about it, you just shoot it. In this case I had to just shoot them one at a time and try to not take all day doing so!

"Accelerator" - Quite a mix of sizes, angles, and distances. The stop plate is the round one on the larger post in the middle.

I missed one plate on the second run, but picked it up OK, had reasonable times on the other runs, but missed a plate just before the stop plate and thought I had hit it, so I got a penalty on that run. Fortunately it was the run that was discarded.

Mr. C. and the "Bullet Hose" on Accelerator.

Next on the schedule was "Showdown", and at least I had shot this one a couple of times in the past.

"Showdown"

From the shooting positions the rectangular plates in the rear appear to the outside of the round ones on each side. The stop plate is in the middle. There were two shooting positions. You shot two runs from one box, two runs from the other box, and the last run from the box of your choice. This was by far my worst stage, as for some reason I couldn't tell if I had hit each plate or not. I ended up with penalties for missed plates on two of the runs. One run got thrown out, but the other bad one hurt my score a lot.

Paul rocked on Showdown!

Doug shooting "Pendulum"

Pendulum is a tricky stage, and when I shot it a couple of times in practice it gave me trouble. The inner rear plates are only 10" in diameter, and are almost a foot lower than the outer 12" plates. It the inner rear plates were really easy to shoot over the top of them. Of the eight stages, I only had two that went badly, and this was one of them. Fortunately from here to the end things steadily improved, even though the one stage that I was dreading, "Outer Limits", was rapidly approaching.

........ end of Part 3.