Match - Prone - ECSC - 11th April 2010

Remember where this was supposed to be child's play? Yeah, that didn't happen. I arrived at the range this morning, saw still flags and a beautiful, clear day, not a cloud in the sky, steady light levels, and thought "Awesome, may as well book the flight to Munich now!". Oh, this was not the case. :p

I started the day with the intention of keeping some very simple principles in mind. These were:
Obtain a good sight picture
Pay religious attention to trigger control and hand position
Follow through strongly.

Now, the trigger control was excellent, and the follow through was good, if not as good as I'd like, but the sight picture was massively problematic. The light and heat caused two problems. In the first place, its direct effect on me was to seriously affect my vision, burnt the sight right out of me. Not sure whether a bigger rearsight unit which shields the eye somewhat might be a better idea. The second is the mirage effect on the target. Now there was nothing bad enough to cause more than perhaps an eight, but it became bloody hard to keep the shots in the ten. This was a phenomenon visible across the board, with various patterns appearing on people's targets, from arcs where getting the foresight visibly centred in the rearsight has become difficult and the shooter is straining to try and achieve this in spite of the optical illusory effects the light was causing to vertical stringing and groups appearing at various points along the arc of shots. The wind was absolutely negligible. I can't think of a single shot today that the wind cost me for definite. Might have been one or two, but it really wasn't an issue.

A personal issue I noticed was something my focus on trigger control made quite visible. Firstly, my sight picture tends to move slightly low and left as I apply pressure to the second stage of the trigger. This may be due to excessive pressure on the grip. I'm going to have to experiment with this somewhat and see what I can come up with. I'll do this as part of my tweaking in the early summer, which will be designed to improve my recoil patterns. The second is that whatever way my trigger is set up since the repair, it's got a bit of creep in it. Not being a fan of this, I'm going to fix it as soon as I have time.

The match was not good, at 567. I'd like to say there were a lot of mistakes which made it that, but it was just sheer inability to deal with the light and mirage. I still haven't found a useful way to keep in control when the light has my eyes messed up. Having largely gotten a solid handle on the wind, I think this is going to be the big challenge over the next few months, along with overall consistency improvements.