Off for some R&R

As you have probably noticed, blogging has been light lately. There are several reasons for this. Normally most of my blog posts this time of the year revolve around pistol matches. I would normally be shooting at least one if not two matches every weekend. Most of these matches would have been at the club in Coupeville.

At that club one person makes all the rules and runs all of the speed steel and bowling pin matches. That same person has won most all of the matches over the last few years. For the last four or five years I have been shooting a version of the Taco grip in the club matches, where your weak hand is either on top of the red dot sight, or holding the barrel, rather than on the rear grip with your strong hand. This is a very common technique, particularly in silhouette matches. It is completely legal under international steel challenge rules. It is quite accurate, but it's also very slow in moving from target to target. I had decided to see if I could evolve the technique in such a way that most of the accuracy could be retained while building up enough speed to be competitive. Last Fall it was finally coming together, and although still not as fast as other techniques, having few misses made up the slack. This year I won the first three of four matches of the season. The "Rule Maker" decided that my shooting style should be banned, and he changed the rules, banning the way I shoot. There is no rules committee or any rules oversight of any kind, so he can do whatever he wants, and there is no appeal process to his decision.

Sure, I could go back to a conventional style, but that would require reworking my race guns as they are currently set up for this style of shooting and are awkward to shoot any other way. They are all top heavy and nose heavy.

If I did change to a shooting style that was within the newest rules and started being successful, would the rules change again? Who knows, but that illustrates one major advantage of shooting in a type of competition where there is an international set of rules. At least you know what the rules are, and if you think a change is needed, there is a process once a year where the rules can be reviewed and approved. Once the season starts, you can be assured that the same rules will apply for the entire season.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, I am not going to be shooting very many matches this year, particularly compared to previous years. There won't be as many local match reports, but bigger reports from the larger matches. I will be practicing a lot in preparation for regional, national, and world competitions which are run with rules that are actually written down, and last for the whole season. I also plan to shoot as many of the Kitsap Rifle & Revolver club's fun steel matches as I can, and maybe squeeze in a GSSF Glock match or so, even if I really suck at trying to be accurate with a Glock. (It's not the gun, it's me.....)

This weekend, instead of shooting a Saturday and a Sunday match, KeeWee and I are loading up the Mini-RV and heading over to the Olympic Peninsula for R&R.

I'll bring back some pictures................