CWSA Falling Plate Match - 10/27/2007

One thing about the CWSA rimfire falling plate matches, you get in a lot of shooting in a relatively short amount of time. It seems like you are either shooting, reloading, helping score, or "On Deck" to go shoot. Saturday was no exception, and the competition was fast and furious. It seemed like just about everyone was shooting faster than usual. It is a round robin head-to-head format, so you shoot three times against every other shooter, and every one of them could beat you if you gave them even the slightest chance. Miss a plate and need a second shot and you most likely will lose that run.

The stop plates, which must be knocked over after the other five plates have been knocked over, were in either position two, or position five, one in from the end. The fastest way, in my opinion, is to shoot the four in a row first, skip over the stop plate for the outside plate, then come back a short distance for the stop plate. This is also the riskiest way, as the last big plate and the stop plate are side by side, and if you miss the big plate, you will already have shot the stop plate before you know you missed the big one, which loses you that run. If you slow up enough to be sure you hit the last big plate, your opponent will get their stop plate ahead of you, so you have to shoot and assume you hit it, and make sure you don't miss! To put it in perspective, reaction time from the buzzer to the first shot for most people is about a second. A reasonable time for all six plates is around 2 1/2 seconds, so that means six shots in a second and a half! Not a lot of time to be thinking about it!

I didn't make any big mistakes until I came up against Rainy, and I missed the big plate, shot the stop plate, and lost the round. I did manage to take the other two, though, but when the results were tallied, this mistake came home to bite me. I even managed to get by Evil Al winning two, and losing one, but they were really close runs. Everything else was going fairly well, until I came up against KeeWee, and I had a failure to fire (good strike on it ,too) but by the time I cleared it she had me. The second table I had a mis-feed after the second shot, and she got me again! I did manage to win the third one, though. Rainy had managed to tie Al on one table.

When the final scores were added up, Al had beat me by one half a point for all the marbles. That one mistake cost me. The failure to fire and the mis-feed cost too, but I still would have been OK.

Some days are like that, but any time I'm even close to Al, I figure I've done OK, and it was a ton of fun giving him a run for it!

Maybe next time..........