A Tale Of Two Matches
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Literally.
I didn’t get around to posting my June USPSA match in a timely fashion, so I figured I’d put it up side-by-side with my July match…as a study in contrasts. My June match was a hot mess, due to a zeroed classifier and a time consuming malfunction. Behold…”Dumpster Fire, Part Deux.”
The first disaster was the second stage of the day, a classifier with multiple no-shoot targets. Without going back and checking my scores, I believe I put something like five hits on no-shoot targets, with the associated penalties resulting in a zero score for the stage. Nice shooting, Tex.
Then came the big malfunction on the fourth stage of the day, where I totally misdiagnosed the problem and made things much worse before I managed to get shooting again…lost tons of time on that one. As it turns out, it looks like the problem came from an overly worn recoil spring. The weakened spring failed to bump the extractor over the rim of the cartridge, and when I tried to fix it by racking the slide, I created a double feed. Big mess…
But compare my June collapse to this month’s match, where (other than being slow) things couldn’t have gone any better.
Sure, I had some makeups on steel…including on the third stage of the day, right at the end, costing me time with a standing reload to finish the last plate. But I am also oddly proud of the last stage, which was an unloaded start with mag pickups required throughout the stage. But I misunderstood the stage briefing, and had originally planned to pick up my last magazine from the center barrel where I started…only to be informed that I couldn’t do that. So I whipped up a new stage plan literally seconds before I stepped to the line. I decided to pick up a second mag from the left side barrel and stow it in a mag pouch before loading another from the barrel and moving on to the last two arrays…and it worked, although I fumbled a bit with stowing the extra mag and lost some time.
Still, my July match was 100% clean, with no penalties and no misses…and 86 A-zone hits out of a 111-shot match. Compared to June, it was a far, far better thing.
