I've been spending a lot more time on my prone shooting, as I've put in an Expression of Interest for the World Cup in Munich next June. Qualifiers should be between February and April and the score should be 590, give or take a point. This is achievable, and the work I'm doing at the moment will certainly get me there, even if it doesn't do so in time to qualify. Things are promising however. Though I'm still very much getting the feel for the new rifle and trying to figure out the most comfortable way to shoot with it, my training scores are good. I shot a 391 ex 400 in a session on saturday, which was marked by several inexplicable bad shots, including two eights. However, since eliminating those eights would have given 395, I'm happy enough to carry on trying to wipe them out. Certainly, the number of nines I'm shooting is dwindling rapidly, though fliers tend to be quite bad, still. I'm hoping this is just a symptom of the new rifle though and will disappear as I settle in.
I shot a match on the sunday as well. Both the good and the bad were strongly in evidence. My first twenty shots were a 194, and that was sloppy, as there are at least two, and probably three shots that were the result of poor attention to sight picture on my part. I settled down then and was happy enough with the 98 that followed, as the fliers were minor and called, due to bad trigger release and bad sight picture. While this is obviously not acceptable, the fact that they were easily called and not bad fliers is heartening. Following this, I had a string of nines in the fourth string, the cause of which I could not ascertain, resulting in a 92. I then got it together again, shooting another 97, though dropping two through being clumsy and rushed, and one to a minor trigger release error, and, due to being completely rushed to finish, dropping another 92 at the end, for 573 overall.
One of the major problems I have is that every time I get down to shoot, with the new rifle, I spend quite some time feeling out the subtleties of the position. As such, I start the match with only forty or forty-five minutes to go, unnecessarily handicapping myself. I have a simplified position in mind which should be much easier to get in and out of quickly and much easier to keep consistent. Hopefully, with training, the results will be at least as good. It's also much more comfortable, providing more balanced support, less pressure on the chest and a more elevated front hand, head and neck. As such, fast shooting should be much easier and more comfortable, and a strong rhythm simple to establish and maintain. The majority of my scores are falling towards the mid-580s mark, hampered by poor strings, so hopefully before too long that will have smoothed out and I can start considering Munich in earnest.
In the new year, I intend sending off for a batch of tested ammunition for my rifle. This will have the twofold effect of ensuring a consistent supply of ammunition which is a known quantity and giving me a more competitively accurate gun and ammunition combination, hopefully. In any case, the new rifle is well and truly run in, so it will be very interesting to see what sort of groups it is capable of in testing. Hopefully I'll have more to report in two weeks, following another match, in which I hope to do significantly better than the 573 I managed on sunday. I would hope for 585+, as this would be a useful platform from which to train towards the Munich qualification score.
