European Steel Match Report

I'm sitting here in the back corner of the match scoring office in Winterswijk and it's 9:30am on Sunday morning. KeeWee and I shot our matches yesterday, and today is our last day here in Winterswijk. This afternoon after the Awards Ceremony we wll be riding back to Amsterdam, spending tonight, tomorrow, and tomorrow night there. On Tuesday  morning we take the train from Amsterdam out to the airport for our flight home.

Yesterday I shot in the match in the morning, and KeeWee shot her match right after lunch. Unfortunately I was still badly jet-lagged and shot, at least at times, like I was sleep walking! I did, however, manage to shoot quite a bit better than last year here, and I ended up with a total time for the six stages of just over 72 seconds. At the moment that puts me on the score board in fourth place, but that won't last long as there are a good number of fast rimfire shooters shooting today. Even so, it looks kind of good to be up near the top, even if it doesn't last out the day. UPDATE: I have now slipped to 7th. (Yes, James "Slipping!)

I did manage to have one good run on the stage called "Smoke & Hope". Smoke & Hope is the fastest of all of the Steel Challenge stages, consisting of four 18x24 plates and a 12" stop plate. For the European Steel Challenge to be shot indoors, most of the stages have been narrowed a bit to fit them into the indoor pistol bays, so that also makes the stages even faster. On this year's ESC10 Smoke & Hope I managed to hit all five plates in 1.46 seconds, which is, at least at the moment, a new European Steel Challenge Championship stage record! That ALMOST, but not quite, makes up for the rest of the stages where I pretty much sucked....... I can see that I really need to allow an extra few days to get my internal clock reset to local time!

Smoke & Hope in Winterswijk at the European Steel Challenge Championships

Video by Bas Limmen

KeeWee's match went well too, although it almost didn't start as planned as her magazines somehow failed to get into the suitcase and are still back at home. Fortunately the magazines used in my High Standard will sometimes also work in hers, so we did a little pre-match testing and found three that worked OK, so that's what we used, and I reloaded them while she was shooting. All of the range officers were tremendous help in this. I don't remember exactly what her score was last year, but she improved by ten or fifteen seconds, I think.I've got somevideo of KeeWee shooting too, and I will get some more posted soon.

Enough blogging for now, I'm going to see how the match is going......