Saturday 9th September

 TARC 09.09.2023

Outdoor Rifle 50 Metres

Silhouettes

Proposed 40 consecutive targets to be dropped with size decreasing each round and very little credit for other than perfect rounds.

A fantastic morning working out the concept and rules, careful accounting for each target after a round was the order of the day.

Any inadvertent drops were deemed lost so could be expensive on your final score and possibly penalise the higher power output rifles.

On the day shooters presented with air rifles from Air Arms (Britain), FX (Sweden) and Sig Sauer (USA) 

Both .177 and .22 calibre were in use with Air Arms and JSB being the pellet of choice, Nigel was trialling different .22 pellet weights to combat windage concerns and we will all be interested in those results.

All shooters took advantage of a paper target round to sight-in at 50 metres and settled in quickly.

While today was about experimenting a score was kept to set a baseline.

Round 1 was to establish what was possible with the largest silhouette.

Geoff shot 9 rams, Nigel 10 rams,  John 6 rams Mark 10 rams. This appeared to be fairly easy and perhaps not the challenge we were hoping for.

Round 2 we mixed them up to see which targets were a challenge.

Geoff shot 9 rams,  Nigel 1 chicken,  Mark 4 pigs, John 9 Turkeys. Not so easy this round. Zero has to be spot on and windage corrections critical. After initially missing it took Mark over half the round to close back in.

Round 3 chickens were going to be a stretch.

John was making it look easy until one spun but did not fall, he recovered well but missed another at the end, regardless we all thought his 8/10 chickens was the round of the day. We all had a few shots at the chickens but could not get nowhere near Johns result.

Set your targets and walk back 50 metres

Chickens the size of a thumbnail are not easy to see at 50 metres so scopes were cranked, and remember to correct for parallax was Nigels advice after a less than perfect start to his round. oops