Sunday, August 23, 2009

Idaho State SASS Championship

Once again, I seem to be having trouble keeping up on the goings-on, so to speak. Like it's been almost three weeks since the Idaho State SASS Championship, the Reckoning at Black's Creek. But here goes anyway...

Clint and I actually went over a day earlier this year than last year, because we wanted to take the RO I and RO II classes. RO stands for Range Officer, and in these classes you learn how to be a good range officer, and you also learn how to set stages up safely, that sort of thing. Very good classes, taught by Wogg and LTC Nathan. There were three of us for the RO I, and five or six for the RO II...

Thursday, warm-up match day, dawned dim and cloudy, and just got more fun from there. It started sprinkling before we even started shooting, which always makes life interesting. Add to that the fact that the extractor claw on the bottom of the bolt on my 66 broke off and went who knows where immediately after ejecting the first empty case of the day, and you have a just totally peachy outing starting up. I ended up shooting Clint's Marlin the rest of the day. The icing on the cake was when a guy who was shooting frontier cartridge duelist walked up to where I was loading a couple of stages later and said, "Your rifle rounds don't seem to be making much smoke."

Okay, brief interlude here: I shoot Frontier Cartridge category. What this means is that I shoot cartridges loaded with some sort of black powder (full-case .45 loads of APP, or American Pioneer Powder in my case), which makes a huge amount of smoke when you pull the trigger. This is especially evident during periods of high humidity (like when it's raining). Clint, on the other hand, shoots what used to be called Traditional, and is now Cowboy, and he was using .357 mag smokeless powder loads. Hence the lack of smoke from my rifle rounds after I started using his Marlin. So, instead of snidely congratulating the guy on making such an astute observation, I just very calmly explained to him that my 66 had broke first crack out of the bag and that I was using my son's rifle, knowing all the while that he was trying to catch me cheating on the SASS smoke standard. I was so proud of myself...

Clint's Marlin hung up on him on the next stage. Aside from that, and in spite of not being able to use my 66, the warm-up match was fun...

That afternoon I happened to run across my favorite one-armed gunsmith, and told him my tale of woe. The guy's a magician, because that evening he found and installed a bolt for my 66, the fore end screws we needed for Clint's 97, and he did enough tinkering on Clint's Marlin that it worked flawlessly the rest of the weekend...

I should mention one of the high points of the warm-up match: world 49er champ JT Wild was on our posse, and just as someone, I don't remember who, was about to shoot, JT suddenly calls a halt to the proceedings. Once it was safe to do so, he suddenly went running down range, and started heeyawing a rabbit that was sitting under one of the targets. Once the rabbit was safely gone from 0ur shooting bay, JT came strolling back, and away we went...

Day One of the main match was cloudy. And wet. The night before, we went to Wally World and got the biggest, heaviest garbage bags we could find, to put over the gun cart. Worked like a charm, and kept the guns relatively dry through a storm the likes of which hadn't been seen in Boise in August in over twenty years, and which lasted into the next day. Just our luck. Fortunately, GrubSlinger had loaned us a couple of slickers, so we could at least be somewhat dry between shooting sessions...

Aside from the incessant rain, Day One went well. I missed one pistol target. Disgustingly enough it was the last target of the only stage that was exposed enough to get enough breeze across the targets to blow the smoke away and let me see all of them. On the other five stages we shot that day, after the first shot I was pretty much just shooting where I thought the targets should be, as opposed to where they actually were. I even got away with it for five out of the six stages. That's one of things that makes shooting Frontier Cartridge so much fun. That and the choking and gagging of the timers and spotters...

Day Two was even wetter than Day One. It would rain for a while, then it would sprinkle for a while, then it would RAIN for a while. Interesting weather pattern. As an aside here, our posse, to the best of my knowledge, which could admittedly be slightly faulty, was the only posse on our side of the range with enough intestinal fortitude to keep going through "wind and rain". The rest wussed and headed for the covered benches behind the shooting bays for a while. We were tough. Or crazy. Or stupid. Take your pick...

Day Two was going well until stage 12, which just happened to coincide with some of the heaviest rain. Up to that point, I had a total of two misses, both with pistol, and both because I tried to go faster than I should have. I know better than that, but occasionally the brain goes into speed racer mode, and there you have it. So anyway, my Remingtons have imitation ivory grips, which to that point I'd actually done a pretty good job of keeping under control in spite of being on the slippery side. Not so on stage 12. For some reason, at pistol time on that stage the brain went "shoot fast, shoot fast", the trigger finger said okay, and the rest of the fingers tried to follow suit, all the while juggling the damn things and trying not to drop them, which would have been an extremely bad thing to do. Consequently, instead of backing off and regrouping, I ended up with five misses for stage 12. Gag me with a field mouse...

All of the stages on both days had a line the shooter had to say to let the timer dude know you were ready to start shooting; while everybody else on our posse did their best to be serious about their lines, I tend to mutilate them in some way if at all possible. All of the lines were from the movie "Rustler's Rhapsody". I should watch that some day. So anyway, one of the lines on Day Two was "Bruce, how do you feel about that?" When it came my turn to shoot that stage, I stepped up to the line while being heckled, in advance mind you, by my (to my mind at least) unfeeling fellow posse members about all the smoke I was about to produce. Willie Killem was the timer guy, and he was trying to reassure me that I had an immense amount of support from the fine folks on our posse when I looked back over my shoulder at him and said, in my best "lie down on the couch, I'm your shrink" voice, "And just how do you feel about that, Bruce?" I thought he was gonna drop the timer. It was great! He almost forgot to beep the timer!

Finally, between the fifth and sixth stages, the rain quit, the sun came out, and it turned into a glorious day. When we were done shooting we spent the next half hour shooting the guns full of BreakFree and wiping them down...

High points of the weekend: the RO classes, being away from work, the people we shot with, being away from work, getting my rifle fixed, being away from work, burger lunches provided as part of our match fees on Friday and Saturday, Cowboy Church on Sunday with Trask River Trapper, and being away from work. Oh yeah, and the fact that with all the rain, my pistols and rifle hummed along with very little expenditure of Murphy's Mix to keep them slicked up...

Low point mainly was the rain, but we dealt with it, and everybody's spirits stayed up in spite of it all. Except maybe for Lone Wolf Larry, whose slicker I inadvertently walked off with when we made the move from stage 12 all the way to the other end of the range to stage 7. I don't think he was too impressed with that part of the proceedings. I don't know what his problem was; he had an umbrella on his gun cart. Sorry, Larry...

Saturday night was the awards banquet at the Red Lion Downtowner. Before you ask how the banquet was, let me ask you this: have you ever eaten a Red Lion banquet dinner? I've eaten a number of them over the years, and I have yet to be impressed. Their drinks are always over-priced, and the food's usually pretty ho-hum. This year was no exception, but we weren't there for the food, we were there to congratulate the folks who did good, and there were lots of those. The food is just one of the those things that fall under the heading of doodoo occurs...

I didn't get any awards this year, but that's not why I shoot anyway. I shoot because I like to shoot and because I like to hear the rest of the posse squawk about the smoke. Clint got his first clean match pin ever this year, so that was the high point of the banquet for me. The closer we got to the last stage of the match, the slower and more carefully he shot, because he could see that pin within reach...

The good folks of the Oregon Trail Rough Riders are to be commended for the great job they did of putting on this shoot in spite of the weather. This is always one of the most fun shoots a cowboy shooter can go to...

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Fun, fun, fun...

Man, it's hard to believe that it's been almost a month since I've written anything here; it's equally as hard to believe that August is half over, and that Cycle Oregon is less than a month away. Incredible. In the interest of not putting anybody to sleep, I'll probably do my catching up in installments. So, what's been happening...

Oh yeah, I got a new bike. For free, as amazing as that may seem. Shortly after the book signing, I called Kim and Janey to see if they wanted to do a bike ride. We set a date and time, and the night before I decided it might be a good thing to get my Roubaix off of the trainer and give it a bath. In the process of bathing it, I found a tiny little hairline crack down near the bottom bracket shell. I couldn't decide whether it was in the paint or the tubing, so the next day when I got to Baker I took it to the local bike shop where I bought it to see if Mark the Bike Shop Guy could tell any more about it than I could. Nope...

Specialized guarantees their frames for life. Whose life I'm not sure, but for life nonetheless. Mark called Specialized while I was there, but ended up on hold for a long time, and finally told me he'd call them the next day and let me know what he found out. He found out that they were going to replace my frame. Way cool. Now, instead of the price of a new bike, I'd only be out the price of the labor to swap all of my components onto the new frame...

The following Tuesday I called the bike shop. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "So have we heard anything from Specialized about my frame?"

Mark: "There's a box here with your name on it, but I've been so swamped I haven't had time to open it." Sounds of box being ripped open. "They didn't send you a new frame. They sent a whole new bike. It's a 2010 Roubaix triple!"

Me: "Cool! When can I pick it up?" Because my bike had a combination and aluminum frame, and the new Roubaix's don't have aluminum in the frame at all, only carbon, apparently they decided to just do away with the old, and in with the new. Sounds like pretty darn good customer service to me! Last Tuesday I rode it into town, managing to cut three minutes off of my all time best time riding from here to Baker. That is a sweet bike!