Back From The USPSA October Match

The day did not start off auspiciously.

After raining heavily last night I awoke to very heavy overcast and a forecast of rain, rain, and more rain.

However, this was the monthly USPSA match day and my first match as a C-class shooter, and I wasn't about to let a little rain interfere with going to the match.

So I packed up the car and drove to the range.

Arriving at the range it was clear that the threat of rain and the already soggy ground was depressing the turnout. Thankfully I had chosen boots over sneakers or would have been dealing with trench foot.

We ended up having two squads of 7 shooters each and headed off to shoot the stages. Still a good bunch of people and we had a good time.

It was indeed wet enough that the steel poppers would cause a splash when they fell after being shot down into the puddles that dotted the range.

The classifier, in honor of the hope that we will soon change the current occupant, was the El Presidente.

I decided to try and push myself to go fast and ran it in 10 seconds, which was not terrible, but the shots certainly were not all in the A-zone.

Sure enough, it did begin raining a bit, making it more interesting when water beads on your shooting glasses while doing a stage. Good training, and the Glock didn't care, but some shooters using high dollar Limited and Open class guns were hurriedly covering them up whenever they were not shooting.

The other stages were fun, from the shoot house where I hit every target in the A-zone with no misses or dropped shots, to the first stage we shot - a rather confusing stage with multiple hidden targets visible from various angles. On that stage I ended up shooting a few targets four times rather than the typical two as I couldn't be sure if I had hit it from a different position yet and really didn't want a failure to engage penalty for missing a target.

The Glock 17 ran flawlessly throughout. I had detail stripped it two nights ago and cleaned the accumulated junk from the firing pin channel and cleaned all the internals, making everything nice and clean and then re-lubed to spec. It ran perfectly and was a bit crisper having been so cleaned.

Next I need to get a new recoil spring for it as even though the current one works fine. The non-gen4 springs should be replaced every 2000 rounds (Gen4 is 5000 rounds) and I've shot it more than that much through this year. Also, it has the original firing pin spring that it likely left the factory when it went to the MPDC, so it is past time to change that as a preventative measure and ensure no problems in the future.

A darn good match and well worth facing the weather.