My First Rifle Match

My friend Brian invited me out to West Bend Barton Sportsmen's Club for a military rifle shoot yesterday. I recently join the Saukville Rifle and Pistol Club (more on that in a later post), so I was able to get out on Friday night to try and get my K-31 on paper, as I hadn't yet shot it, and I replaced the rear sight with a MOJO aperature unit.

I got it pretty well sighted in at 50 yards, and I was going to be shooting at 100yds Sunday, so I figured I'd be close enough. Oops. I freaked out a little bit when my first shot wasn't on paper, but I tweaked the sights a little bit and got lucky on my second sighting shot. The shoot consisted of four stages, each of ten rounds, with two sighting shots (they actually do you a favor and drop the lowest two scores):

1) Standing, no sling, slow fire (10 rounds in 8 minutes IIRC)

2) Sitting, w/ sling, rapid fire (B/c I'm shooting a bolt action I got two strings of 5 rounds here, 70 seconds each. Everyone with a semi-auto got 70 seconds for 10 rounds)

3) Prone, w/ sling, rapid fire. (10 rounds in 70 seconds. Again, I was able to do two strings of five each here.)

4) Prone, w/ sling, slow fire. (10 rounds in 8 minutes)

The first two are shot on a standard 100yd NRA high-power rifle target, the third stage was shot on a simulated 300yd target, and the fourth was shot on a 600yd simulated target.

My scores (give me a break, I'm new to this rifle thing):
1) 66
2) 71
3) 45
4) 42

So, a 224 out of a possible 400. Ironically, my best score was rapid fire sitting, where I forgot to use my sling as permitted, and instead just had it taught against the side of the rifle. I'm not so sure I would have done much better otherwise, though. Next month I'll do better, but I'll have to put some rounds downrange in the meantime. I just need to remember to take it slow and easy, and concentrate on getting my sight picture consistent.