Glock Classic Report

It was a rather long two days, but under John Davidson's direction the KRRC NW Glock classic went off without a hitch. I arrived at the range on Saturday around noon. I would have been there a bit earlier but the Washington State poor excuse for a ferry system was running late. My plan was to RO and help run the match on Saturday, then shoot two classes on Sunday as time permitted, and RO all day on Sunday. Needless to say I was pretty busy and I didn't have much time to take pictures. The basic match consisted of three stages, four runs on each stage. Your score was your total time, plus any penalties you picked up for hitting too far from the center of the cardboard targets. You only were allowed 11 rounds per run, so it was possible to pick up penalties for falling plates not knocked over with your allowed number of shots.

I spent the afternoon on Saturday painting plates on the plate rack, resetting the plates, and keeping the bits of lead from getting under the front edge of the plates, causing them to fall over when they shouldn't. By the end of the day on Saturday 128 shooters had shot the match.

After the match Saturday John and Jeanette and I headed to one of our favorite restaurants, the 50's themed Red Apple Diner for dinner.

Sunday morning bright and early we were all back at the range for day two of the Glock match. I decided to shoot the match first thing before it got too busy. My plan was to shoot two classes, "Competition" and "Civilian", but shoot the same Glock 17 9mm. in each class.I could consider the Comp class as a warmup/throwaway and try to figure out how to shoot the 17 on the stage. Then shoot the second entry, CIV, and hopefully do OK, or at least not suck!

On Wednesday I had loaded up about 50 test cartridges with 115 Grain bullets over 5.4 grains of Silhouette powder. I took the test ammo to the range and it ran flawlessly both in the Glock 17 and in the Glock 34. I didn't have much time to test it for accuracy though, I was mostly comcerned that the guns would run OK. Since it seemed to work fine in both Glocks, I loaded up 300 rounds for the match.

On the first run of the first stage the first round fired but didn't extract. I cleared it and got the next round in, and it fired, but failed to extract. For some reason the load that worked just fine a few days before wasn't hot enough the cycle the gun. Bummer! Fortunately I had tossed in a Remington 250 round bulk pack, and I switched over to that. The gun ran fine on that all day. Go figure.....

Since there were only three stages, it didn't take too long to shoot the match in both classes. It went mostly as planned, and the Comp class was terrible. The CIV class sucked much less ,but still sucked. Not nearly as bad as last year, and probably somewhere above the middle, but not a lot above the middle. I just don't have the eyesight anymore to shoot iron sights quickly and hold any accuracy. Granted, not being practiced with the long travel Glock trigger didn't help.

That all being said, I wasn't planning on beating anyone anyway, as the whole idea was to have fun shooting, even if I wasn't to good at it. I did have fun!

The rest of the day was spent working in one of the bays where a fund raising side event was set up. It was five steel plates against the clock, one dollar per run, with a 25% payout to the winner. I think by the end of the day we had taken in several hundred dollars .

Finally, hot, dry, and dusty, the match came to a close. We packed up the stages, gathered up the brass, and wrapped it up for another year.

I climbed into the RV and headed back to Port Townsend to catch the ferry back to Whidbey Island, then back to Castle Completely for a shower and a good night's sleep.

It had been a long two days, but a lot of fun, too.......................................