Ephrata Sportsman's First Monthly Steel Match

Every year for the last few years the Washington State Steel Challenge Championships has been held at the Ephrata Sportsmen's range in Ephrata, Washington. It has always been a "Once a year" event, run primarily by Patrick Kelley, the 3 Gun Speed Demon! There has not been any regularly scheduled steel matches the rest of the year.

That's now all changed. Cowboy Action Shooter Grant Galbreath has stepped up to the plate, and is now running once a month Steel Challenge matches in Ephrata. The ranges are big, and the steel is outstanding, being as it's from Mike Gibson and MGM targets. They use genuine AR500 armor plate steel, and they ring like a gong when you hit them. Being armor plate, they also won't end up all shot up, pock-marked, dangerous, and have to be replaced in a few years.

I had an all day long and extremely boring at times meeting on Friday that I absolutely had to attend, and I wasn't looking forward to it at all. However, when I found out that the Ephrata club was going to run their first monthly steel match the next day, and since Ephrata is only another hour or so's drive East, my outlook brightened up considerably! KeeWee had to work, so she couldn't go, which is just as well, as the meeting would have meant she would have to kill a full day in Ellensburg, with nothing to drive but our "Mini-Land-yacht.

I drove across Snoqualmie Pass to Ellensburg on Thursday afternoon, about a four hour drive. Getting to Ellensburg Thursday evening, I grabbed a quick dinner in a small local restaurant, then parked the RV behind the restaurant for the night. The battery ran down for the furnace, and it was a cold night, but I had two sleeping bags, so I didn't totally freeze.

The next morning I breakfasted at the same place, then drove a short distance to Central Washington University, where the meeting was being held. The meeting was about as I expected, and my presentation went fairly well, without any major "Fox Passes".

After the meeting, I drove on East, crossing the Columbia River at Vantage, and then onward to Ephrata. I met up with Grant and his wife Carlin in Ephrata, and we headed off to a nearby Mexican restaurant for an excellent meal and conversation. After dinner they dropped me off at the RV, parked in the Walmart Parking lot, where I spent Friday night. I kept the furnace either off, or set on low, so the battery lasted through the night, and Saturday morning was much more pleasant!

The club range is only a few minutes drive from the Walmart, so after some cold coffee from the Thermos, I headed over there for the day. In the club house they had both hot coffee and doughnuts! Perfect! I signed in and had a while to sit around and visit with some of the other shooters. Some I had met before, but there were also a lot of new faces. After a little more coffee and another doughnut (yum) we had a brief shooters meeting, and then got down to the shooting part of the match. We squadded up into groups, and headed to our first stage. Our squad was a great bunch, with a mix of experienced and new steel shooters, but everyone in the squad was a decent shooter. Everyone helped out with scoring, running the timer, and so forth, and we had a great time.

The match consisted of five regulation Steel Challenge stages, and even though two stages had to share one bay, everything moved smoothly. In no time, it seemed, the match was over! DANG! The weather even cooperated a bit, and we didn't see any rain, and the wind only came up for a short while. It still wasn't all that warm, but for the time of year, the weather was certainly decent.

After the match we headed back to the clubhouse, where Chili dogs were waiting for us. To me, perhaps the biggest and best part of shooting is not the shooting, but the shooters themselves. Getting the chance to hang out, visit, tell stories, and socialize with the other shooters is what makes it all fun. Unfortunately, I had a long drive, a questionable mountain pass, and a ferry boat ride between me and Castle Completely, so after farewells all around, I fired up the Mini-Land-Yacht and headed West. Fortunately the pass wasn't too congested and it wasn't snowing, so the trip, though tiring, went smoothly. It was good to be home and to sleep in a regular bed, for sure!

Congratulations to Grant and the gang at the Ephrata Sportsmen's Club for running a first class match! It's a long haul for me to get to their matches, and the fuel cost alone makes it rather expensive. Even so, it's well worth the trip. If  you live anywhere in Central or Eastern Washington and have wanted to give steel shooting a try, then this is a match worth attending. Their steel matches are on the 2nd. Saturday of every month, with sign-up at 8am, shooter's meeting at 9am, and shooting right after the meeting.

Eastern Washington is lucky that on the 1st. Saturday of the month the Yakima Rifle & Pistol Association also puts on a Steel Challenge match at Moxee, which is just a few miles East of Yakima. Both of these clubs are running true Steel Challenge" stages, so these matches are both highly recommended.

Maybe we'll see you there!

Piru, Here We Come!

This is the big week for Steel Challenge shooting, as the Steel Challenge World championships will be held in Piru, California on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The awards ceremony will be on Sunday morning. Where is Piru? Piru is up in the hills a bit West of Valencia. Valencia is  best known for the Six Flags Magic Mountain Theme Park. Valencia is roughly a thirty minute drive North of the North end of Los Angeles, or more specifically, Burbank.

Tomorrow morning KeeWee and I board the Whidbey SeaTac shuttle for an hour and a half ride to the  Airport, then fly from Seattle to Burbank. In Burbank I pick up the rental car and "White-Knuckle" my way out of LA and up the freeway to Valencia, where we are staying. Thursday morning at 8:30am I will be shooting the Rimfire Open division, shooting all eight stages in one day. I don't know yet when I will be shooting the Centerfire Open division, as it could be four stages on Friday and four stages on Saturday, or it could be all eight on either Friday or Saturday. I won't know until I get there.

The new Tanfoglio Gold Custom 9mm. race gun is working pretty well, and is pretty reliable, but it's just barely ready for prime time, so to speak. Each match it's a little better, but it still has more recoil than it needs, and it still stove-pipes once in a while. It's actually quite a bit ahead of schedule, as I had originally figured on not having it really ready for competition until early Spring, so having a few problems is still to be expected.

The weather in Piru is always horribly hot and miserable, but this year I think I've got a better handle on controlling dehydration and heat exhaustion, so I'm hoping problems from that will be minimal.

The Rimfire High Standard race gun with the Volquartsen barrel and OKO red dot sight has been working really well the last few weeks, and I'm fairly confident that it will do exactly what it's supposed to do, provided I do may part!

Since I don't know exactly what the shooting schedule will be, I don't know how much time I'll have for blogging from Piru, but I am taking my netbook so if I get the chance I can post a report or so.

Stay tuned..............

Off To Another Match.......

This time of year it seems like every weekend we're off to another match, but it's not quite as busy as it seems. Tomorrow, Sunday, KeeWee and I are headed to Puyallup for a fun steel match at the Paul Bunyan Club, followed by lunch with the gang at the cool restaurant at the local airport.

I think I'm almost there with the Tanfoglio, as it's running more and more reliably each match.

I've replaced the walnut grips with a Hogue wrap-around grip with finger grooves that fits my relatively small hands perfectly. I'm hoping they will make it a little bit easier to get a proper grip when drawing from the holster. So far in practice it seems easier to get the proper grip with them.

I've also replaced the temporary over-sized left side safety lever with a slightly different shape, but almost the same. This time instead of the aluminum I used for the prototype, I made this one out of solid stainless steel. It should out-last the gun!

I've also taken some time to go through the gun and do a little polishing and smoothing on some of the inner bits, and the trigger feels a bit better. I still haven't got the load dialed in, but it's not too far off, although I'm shooting an estimated power factor somewhere around 135 or 140, which is still way too high. My goal is for a power factor about 125 to 128. Minimum required for major steel matches where they use target sensors is 120.

It's barely five weeks to the World championships in Piru, CA., and there's two major matches between now and then. I'd sure like to have the gun dialed in so all I have to worry about is my shooting!

See you all on Monday!

(Don't forget to send in your registration and book your hotel room for the Gun Blogger rendezvous, it's only seven weeks away!)






 

Not A Bad Weekend, Considering......

Last Friday mid-day  I was still scrambling back and forth between the range and the loading bench, trying to figure out a good load and bullet combination for the Tanfoglio for Saturday's steel match in Yakima. The powders I had been experimenting with were too fast to burn, and I couldn't get a recipe that would reliabily cycle the gun without getting close to exceeding allowable pressures.

One powder I had experimented with seemed to be pretty close to what I needed, but I was just about out of it. My friend Lou, of the "Mad Gun" blog, also a Tanfoglio Gold Team 9mm. owner, suggested I try Power Pistol, a powder which had been working well for him. Fortunately on Thursday I had made a quick trip (two hours each way) and bought a couple of pounds of power pistol to try it out.

I didn't have time to work up to an ideal load, so I decided to go with one a bit on the hot end of the range, but that worked well for Lou. I loaded up ten or twelve rounds and scurried over to the range. Although they were loud and had some recoil, the accuracy was good, and the gun ran without problem. I I rushed home and loaded up forty more, and went back to the range to run them through the gun. Ten rounds was no where near enough testing to have any confidence in the load. The forty rounds ran fine, so back to the bench to load a couple of hundred rounds for the match. After getting the ammo ready, it was a rush back into the house to get packed, a shower, and put on some clean clothes.

Our plans had been to try for the 2:30pm ferry over to America, but even with all the delays and last minute stuff, we still managed to get out the door in time to catch the 3:00pm boat. We wanted to get at least past Bellevue before traffic got really ugly, being a holiday weekend, and Highway 405 through Bellevue can be one of the worst in the US when it gets ugly. It was starting to get heavy, but was still passable when we went through Bellevue, and just past Bellevue we pick up I-90 which takes us across Snoqualmie Pass and into Eastern Washington. I-90 was also starting to get loaded too, but we were just early enough that the giant Friday afternoon Seattle Exodus to Eastern Washington for the weekend was still building. Once across Snoqualmie, we passed Cle Elum, and continued East to Ellensburg, where we pick up a different freeway headed South towards Yakima. Once we hit Yakima we turn East again for a few miles, past Moxee, and then a couple of more miles to the range. For a bunch of good pictures of the scenery and stuff along the way, check out KeeWee's post at KeeWee's Corner. We arrived a couple of hours before sunset, and parked our mini-land-yacht for the night. We were treated to a really nice sunset.

The next morning we were up bright and early, and I helped to get the plates hung on the target stands in the range bays in preparation for the match. After signup and a short shooter's meeting, we broke into squads and got to the shooting part! We had a little over fifty guns entered, so not a bad turnout, considering a number of shooters were taking the weekend off as they had been to the USPSA Area 1 championships the previous weekend.

This was going to be an interesting match for me, as it was the debut of my Tanfoglio 9mm. race gun, and the Rescomp CR Speed holster. I hadn't had a lot of time to practice the draw, and I was expecting to be slow out of the holster. I had never shot the Tanfoglio at steel, and it was only approximately sighted in, so I figured I may be doing some point of aim compensating in the match. For the Tanfoglio this was going to be more of a "Shakedown Cruise" rather than a match, as I was mostly interested in just having some fun shooting it, and finding out what was working, and what wasn't. Next weekend at Kitsap Rifle & Revolver Club is the Kitsap Classic, and I really want to have things running smoothly for that.

The weather, although a bit warm for us Western Washington types, was nice, with temperatures in the mid to upper eighties. KeeWee had an umbrella to keep her out of too much sun, and I had bottled water and Gatorade powder to mix into the water to keep from getting dehydrated.

It seemed like the match was over in no time, but KeeWee and I both felt seeking a cooler place would be nice! The Tanfoglio had run well all day, in spite of the recoil and noise. My draws were nothing spectacular, but not excessively slow for just getting into it, either. My split times between plates with the Tanfoglio were better than I was expecting to do. All things considered, it had gone very well. In the Open class, we only had one other entry, so I either won Open, or came in next to last, depending on how you look at it! As a reference though, my time was about the same as the winning time in Centerfire Limited, so it's a good starting point, and hopefully with enough practice I can get some reasonable scores. I am seriously considering taking the Tanfoglio to Piru, California for the Steel Challenge World Championships in August and entering Open as well as rimfire. It will all depend on how it goes this weekend in Kitsap. That will be the first real test to see if I can shoot it well enough that I don't embarrass myself in Piru!

After the match was over, several of the guys wanted to try out the Tanfoglio and I hadn't used up all the hastily loaded ammunition, so we emptied a bit more brass just for the fun of it.

We wanted to get on the road home before it got  too late in the day, so we loaded up and headed out. We made a stop at the Dairy Queen for ice cream, a gas station for some fuel and a big diet Pepsi for me, and headed home. A little over five hours later we pulled into the driveway at Castle Completely. It had been a fun weekend, and Murphy only showed up a couple of times!

Next weekend, on to Kitsap for the Kitsap Classic! It's gonna be fun!!

Not As Planned, again.........

Ah yes, best laid plans, etcetera, etcetera. KeeWee and I planned on driving over to Ephrata on Friday during the day, spending the night at the Oasis Park Campground in Ephrata, shooting the Washington State Steel challenge Championships on Saturday, then right after the match driving back to the West side of the State to Puyallup, spending Saturday night at the range in Puyallup, then shooting the Paul Bunyan Club's Club championship on Sunday, then driving home Sunday night.

Well, it followed the plan as far as getting to the Oasis Park campground. We were parked next to John and Jeanette Davidson from the Kitsap club, and we shared a pleasant evening of conversation, campfire, and hotdogs and marshmallows. Not long after we got to the campground James Austin pulls in, so James joined us around the fire for a really nice evening. So far, everything according to plan.

We decided to turn in a bit early and get a good night's sleep, so we did. KeeWee had been feeling a bit crummy earlier in the week, but some antibiotics seemed to have sorted that out OK. Unfortunately, she ended up getting sick during the night, and neither of us got a whole lot of sleep.

We decided to head out to the range and see how she felt. She didn't feel well enough to shoot the match, but she figured she could stay in bed in the nice warm RV just as well as being home in bed, so we decided I'd shoot the match, and we'd head straight home after, instead of going to Puyallup.

The morning was raining steadily, so it didn't look like it was going to be a whole lot of fun, anyway, and for KeeWee to get wet and cold when she was already feeling lousy would be a really poor idea. So, we made sure the furnace was turned up and she spent the day either reading or sleeping. I went out and sleep-walked/sloshed my way through the match.

I often have trouble getting focused on the very first stage, so I really tried to ignore the lack of sleep and other distractions, and it worked, at least for the first stage, and I turned in some pretty good times. From there, though, it really looked like I was out of gas, and things didn't go well.

By lunch time I was wet, and not very happy with the way I was shooting. It had not been a good morning. At the lunch break I again checked in to see how KeeWee was doing, and the comfy bed and warm RV was keeping her as comfortable as possible. I put on dry clothes and ate a little bit, but I wasn't really very hungry. I just sat in the RV, drank some hot coffee, and tried to re-charge the batteries a bit. Just getting dry and warm made me feel a little better.

I could have taken a nice long nap very easily, but I still had four more stages to shoot, so off I went to the next stage. The rain had just about stopped and it was a little warmer, so that in itself was a nice improvement. I decided that this could be a good learning experience for me, as I was certainly  not in the best condition, but I needed to work on staying focused and doing as well as I could without digging any more big holes to jump into! I think I did learn a little more about getting focused and the final four stages went fairly well. Three went very well, and I even had the fastest time of the match on one of the stages, and it was even on one of my weaker stages.

After the final stage was completed I helped to put away the targets and stands, and then headed to the RV to see how KeeWee was doing. She seemed to be holding up pretty well, considering the circumstances.

As the scores were being finished up, they had a fast draw against the clock competition for cash prizes, but I was completely worn out from the match and didn't have any interest in entering. I just wanted to find out how I had done, and then hit the road for home.

A very nice laser engraved Spyderco knife.

 

 

Finally they got to announcing the scores, and although the terrible morning had done it's damage, I still had posted the second fastest pistol time of the match, and had even won one of the stages overall! I ended up 2nd. in Rimfire and the Top Senior. If I could have shot in the morning like I did in the afternoon I would have been right there at the top. James was the fastest revolver shooter, and Debbie, also from Kitsap, was the top Rimfire Lady. The Kitsap club had done rather well, considering the conditions.

Right after the awards we fired up the RV and headed towards home. Once we got out onto the road the wind was gusting and blowing us around, so it was a wrestling match right up to where we started to climb the East side of the Cascades to get across Snoqualmie pass. When the wind stopped, it started raining heavily, and rained all the way home. The rain was coming down hard enough that the raindrops were bouncing off the pavement, and there were lots of areas of standing water to hydroplane across. To add to the fun, there was a layer of ground fog across the pass, making it nearly impossible to see where the lanes were supposed to be. Bleh....

By the time we got home I felt like I'd been in a fight and had lost badly. Even though I continued to drive in my sleep, at least I was warm, in bed, and asleep.

It had been an interesting weekend, to say the least!