Yesterday was the first Cowboy Action Shoot for a few months for me. Each night there was a shoot scheduled I'd set my alarm clock and then it would start raining. I would roll over, turn off the alarm and go back to sleep as the range my club shoots at is on that black gumbo dirt and the Pards and their guncarts sink without a trace. Well, not quite but it is unmanageable and the cars and trucks get stuck, bigtime.
Linda Lou was eager to see me gone for a while, she says the biggest downside to being retired is that I'm always underfoot. So I loaded the guncart into the van, it was extra heavy as I had a pal that was supposed to come for his first shoot. I loaded it up the night before so as to let Linda Lou sleep, it takes a lot of ugly words to get that thing out the door and down the steps. It's easier bringing it home, having shot the ammo it's a lot lighter.
I have solved the problem of being too deaf for the alarm clock. Usually it rings until it wakes Linda Lou up and then she wakes me up. Well the instant the alarm rang yesterday Cochise' Apache Princess jumped up in the bed and stuck her cold, wet nose in my armpit. Thankfully I did not jump quite high enough to get into the ceiling fan.
I had my cup of coffee, poured the next one into a road cup which I carefully left on the counter and climbed into the van and drove off, cleverly forgetting to take my morning pills. The morning batch of pills contains the meds I take to control my tremors so it was an interesting day. I drove up to Greenville and stopped at the McDonalds to meet Joel. I called him, since he wasn't there and that's when I discovered he wasn't coming. Slug. A little thing like Mother's Day stopping him from shooting?
So I finished my health food breakfast and refilled my paper coffee cup and drove the rest of the way to the shoot. Fortunately I had dithered around long enough that the rest of the club members had already got the targets set. In my defense I stayed late enough to put them away after the shoot.
It's been rainy enough that we only had three sets of targets set up and we just shot two different scenarios on each set. That helped keep the mud down, a little, not much. But instead of pulling the trailer full of those big steel targets we humped them.
The very first stage marked my day, seventy-odd seconds and two misses. The Pards shooting the light recoiling, smokeless rounds got through that same stage in about 25 seconds. That is ten pistol, starting from the leather, ten rifle and four shotgun rounds, the shotgun staged empty and open. With the various physical problems I have I'll never shoot a stage in less than 30 seconds so I go for the style points. The BOOM! and the smoke, the big flame out the muzzle, the other shooters gasping for a breath without sulphur smoke...the CLANG! when that 250 grain soft lead slug hits the steel. Who am I kidding, I could be thirty five and I'd still shoot Frontier Cartridge warthog loads. The Pards shooting those light smokeless loads go "pop-tink" instead of "BOOM-CLANG!" If I wanted "pop-tink" I'd save money and shoot the .22.
Anyhow I did not shoot real well, I only had one clean stage (clean=no misses) and, as usual, the feller pulling Range Officer duty complained about having to put the electronic timer away and having to drag that eight-day Grandfather Clock around. Eh, he needed the exercise.
Anyhow I finished the shoot with no safety violations which means it was a successful shoot. I didn't go to lunch with everyone as I wanted to get home to Linda Lou for Mother's Day. For a Mother's Day meal she wanted her favorite, a Sonic double cheeseburger and tater tots. I did not really marry her because she was a cheap date but it didn't hurt, either.
For some reason I didn't take any pictures at this shoot but there are some of earlier shoots..
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