Your Author had been on a bit of a dry spell at shooting matches since taking 11th and 19th in consecutive weeks at Dubois in late September/early October. Still, when you compare my results with what I was turning in during the latter part of last season - well, there is no comparison, really. Aside from a couple of good results early on in the year, my shooting was embarrassing, so much so that I really had no interest in going back to them this season.
There's a certain amount of pride in being able to take a factory gun with a factory barrel (with the only accoutrement being an extra-full choke screwed into the end of the barrel) and still have success at these things, especially when you're going up against folks with their 60-inch custom barrels, gun rests that will hold up both ends of your gun so all you have to do is look through your scope and shoot, and scopes that enable you to count the amount of BBs on your board from 47 yards away. I felt like I was fighting the good fight against people who were pouring ridiculous amounts of money into this endeavor, and any meat I won last year was extra sweet as a result.
Thing is, I'm just not very good. Try as he did, my dad wasn't terribly successful at immersing me in gun/hunting culture. Sure, I shot a BB gun when I was a kid, and occasionally a .22 - I can't begin to tell you how many EVIL DASTARDLY aluminum cans I killed in my formative years - but due to my comparative lack of interest, shooting was never really a priority with me.
As time went on last season and my original run of beginner's luck (several positive results - a couple of meat finishes in the lower top 10) ran out, my shooting got steadily worse, to the point where it was an embarrassment to show my boards to my more experienced brothers-in-law, and every adjustment (and readjustment and unadjustment) just made the situation worse. My 12-shot boards had very little shot on them; they looked more like 5-shot boards. I would have had better luck standing there and throwing the shells at my board.
And going to shooting matches stopped being fun. I'm a competitor; it's only fun for me if I turn in a respectable performance. No one likes to embarrass themselves, and even if the group I went with didn't think it was that bad, I did. And that was a very difficult thing to take; ask my wife, who endured many rides home from shooting matches last season with me being stone-cold silent.
Don't get me wrong. Going to shooting matches is much like going to the casino - if you go there expecting to win, then you will, 99 times out of 100, be sorely disappointed. But "expecting to win" and "giving yourself every opportunity to win" - much like lessening the house edge by playing perfect blackjack - are two different things. And I was coming up terribly short in the latter.
Something had to be done. Either improve my game by any means necessary, or devote my time and monetary resources to something a little more productive and less embarrassing, like that midget porn film I've been wanting to make.
Well, since my wife isn't amenable to the latter, I broke down and bought a scope in late February. And it tore me up. It was a heartbreaking admission that I wasn't a very good shooter and needed a crutch.
But even with the scope, the last handful of matches in the season showed no notable improvement in my performance - in fact, the scope made things so much worse that I ended up looking under my scope to try and improve - and I was angry about it. I resolved to just not go to them this season. It was, in my mind, a pointless exercise. And no matter how much my wife asked, we were NOT going this year. I didn't care how much she or her brothers were disappointed; I had what was left of my pride to maintain.
Well, we ended up going. (Like this really surprises you.) And, just like last season, the first night out was a whole handful of nothing. But I was determined to make the best of it.
Things started turning around that night. My brother-in-law has what is called a "board sighter." You stick it into the end of your gun and look through the scope - it's set for 47 yards - and then you can adjust your scope based on what you see through the board sighter. We got it sighted in, and the next week, I took 11th at Dubois. Then the next week, I took 19th at Dubois. The aggregate of the two finishes was a half a hog (front quarter one week, hind quarter the next, or vice versa).
And - lo and behold! - shooting matches started being fun again. I was covering my boards with shot, and even if they weren't "in the money," so to speak, it was still great to shoot some boards that other folks would say was about as good as what you could get out of a factory gun.
As I said earlier - if you go *expecting* to win, you're going to be let down. But I was comfortable with the subsequent dry spell that I endured, lasting a bit over a month, because I was giving myself every opportunity to place well - sometimes your X just isn't in the right spot, and sometimes you pepper your entire board with shot except for the X, and that's OK.
Which brings us to last Friday night. It was the last Friday night match of the year that Ireland was having, and nothing had really come of the previous three Friday nights that I'd been there. My wife (bless her heart) shot a board and did pretty well with it - it got tossed, but she was proud of it because it was as good as, if not better than, many of mine from the last month.
Then I shot a board a couple of rounds later, with no result.
Then another, with the same "OUT" stamped on it.
Then another ...
Went in to the judge's stand to wait for them to review and toss my board. He looked at it, looked at me, said "Are you Brandon G.?" I said, "Yes." He showed me the board and said, "That's pretty good." I looked at it for a moment, looked at him, looked back down at the board, and said, "..... Huh." And handed it back to him.
Was it dead center? By the naked eye at a drunken first glance, yes.
Upon further review - and verified by the judge's microscope - it was just a pecker hair off. But still good enough for meat of the red variety.
I'd photoshopped the finishing position of that board out of the closeup above. Here's how it looked. (And no, for some reason, they can't cut boards straight at Ireland this season. Don't know what's going on there.)
Please note the "2" denoting the near-dead-center shot. That means second place out of the 300-something boards shot that night. In shooting match terms, that translates to a hind quarter of beef. Yeah!
And still, the story is bittersweet. Sometime in between that board and my next board two rounds later - and it might have been sometime during the shooting of my second-place-winning board - my scope got nudged or bumped or hit or something. It was nothing malicious by someone else or careless by me - Winchester 870s kick pretty hard and can knock the hell out of a scope with enough shots, which is my theory for what turned my scope into unsalvageable junk. Maybe it was just meant to get one portion of beef, and it did its job and went quietly into the cool November night.
My wife and I decided to share a board later in the match, and with my scope now essentially junk, we had to borrow a gun from one of our friends. For comparison's sake, look at my board above and then look below to see how much more coverage there is on the below board that she and I shot together. That's how much difference a custom barrel makes (vs. a stock barrel).
All the same, though, I'm going to enjoy the inconvenience of trying to find a spot in my deep freeze for the hind quarter of beef coming my way. It's a nice problem to have.
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