KRRC Fun Steel - May 2010 Report

Last Saturday KeeWee and I headed over to the Kitsap Rifle & Revolver Club's range for another one of John's challenging Fun Steel matches. John usually uses a stage or so from the Steel Challenge rule book, plus a few of his own design, and this was no exception. John had one stage with two 18 x 24's one in each back corner, and three plates in the middle in a vertical line. The three middle plates were so close they were touching, and the middle one of the three was the stop plate. If you accidentally hit the stop plate while trying for the plate immediately above or below it the run is over and you collect penalties for the missed plates. Lots of folks were shooting over the top one, or under the lower one, trying to stay away from the stop plate! Since the three plates were right above each other it was also really easy to miss one of the plates and not be able to get stopped before you shot the stop plate too, again with penalties!

I entered twice so I could get in twice as much shooting, for a total of twelve stages. KeeWee took the more normal approach and only entered once. The weather was really pleasant, and we han a fun day of it. Liberty News (blog) and I have been trying to meet up for several years, but it's always worked out that if I was at the KRRC range, he wasn't, and vice-versa. Saturday we finally managed to both be there on the same day, although he wasn't shooting the match, just getting in some target shooting. Here's the Liberty News post on the day.

KeeWee is really getting dialed in with the new barrel I built for her, and this was the first match where she's actually averaged sub-four second shot strings, and there were some difficult stages in the matches. Here shot string average was 3.77 seconds, with several runs in the high two's. For someone who never practices, that's pretty decent, and if she keeps improving it's going to be interesting next Saturday at the European Steel Challenge Championships (volcanos permitting, of course!)

On the last stage my race gun failed to fully eject the empty casing, leaving it sideways, captured between the slide and barrel. I cleared it, and it did the same on the next shot. I cleared it again, and it did it again. Crap! Just what I need is to break the race gun just before we leave for Holland. I finished the stage with my backup gun.

After the match John, James, KeeWee and I headed to a local pizza place for food, refreshments, and socializing. From there it was a couple of hours and two ferry boat rides to get home. We did stop at a Dairy Queen for ice cream on the way, though. Have you tried their caramel fudge brownie blizzard? Not bad at all!

Finally we were back home again, tired and a bit road weary, but Bun was glad to see us as she'd been alone all day, and she really doesn't like being alone like that. After a bit of bunny petting we were off to bed, pretty well worn out from a really fun day......../