One Hot Match

Today's USPSA match was a real scorcher.

The sun was out and it was brutal with nary a breeze to stir the air during the match.

By the end of the match I was seriously dragging - 9 stages felt like an eternity.

Some bays had covered rest ares which were helpful but they often weren't large enough for everyone, and four of the bays at one end were cruelly naked under the sun and you were in the open to bake for a long time.

Even worse there was a major bottleneck at our very last stage.

Due to an error in course design, there were a ton of re-shoots which slowed everything down so we were stacked up 3 squads behind the squad shooting it in the very next bay. We sat around for an hour waiting to get a turn to shoot our last stage.

The problem was that not only was it a large and confusing stage with 32 rounds consisting of two runs, as well as hidden and angled targets, but it also had a center portion where it had 3 poppers clustered behind 4 no-shoots laid out in the vertical square so you were shooting through a small hole between the no shoot targets to get the poppers. Knocking a popper down through a no-shoot target caused the re-shoot and a pause as the entire stage was pasted and the shooter got to go again. That sucked. Our Squad RO declared that if a no shoot was hit and a popper dropped, he was just going to score it and not declare a reshoot. We all agreed as by then we were not going to drag this out anymore than it had to be to get it done.

Even with lots of sunscreen, a hat and drinking a liter and a half of water I still felt dehydrated. I'll be sure to bring more water next time.

I was dragging badly by the end of the match, so I came in 20th of 28 limited class shooters with 1008 out of 1085 possible points.

The M&P 40 Pro still ran like a champ. One magazine with the Taylor Freelance base did not lock the slide open on empty which is apparently fixable with a stronger spring than kjust the factory magazine spring, while the other worked 100%.

Lots of people had magazine seating fumbles as the day wore on, mostly due to heat exhaustion. There were lots of issues due to reloaded ammo not being powerful enough to operate the guns, especially with 1911s. One Glock shooter had a front sight fly off while shooting in the open, not due to hitting any object, which locked the gun up for a bit as the screw holding the sight jammed the slide until it was cleared. Loctite is a mandatory thing for sight attachment screws people.

It was a long hot match for everybody with over 217 rounds fired.

On the upside, I found out I made C-class in Limited from last month's classifier match. Considering how i flubbed my way through the classifiers that was rather happy-making, but I've got a long way to improve.