The correct name of the match was......
..... The WWCCA, February 200-yard, no windflags, shoot over the snow, mirage blinding, hope-and-pray, forget it, you-be-screwed, score match turned group match because we wanted to just go down-range to change the target only once match.
I haven't had that much fun since playing pick-up football in the park as a kid.
After driving my Zamboni down the road to the WWCCA rifle range, I walked into the range house for our normal February 200-yard score match. Bill, Gammon, Dominic Grunas, Rich Quigley, Target-crew Wayne and Dana Raven were sitting there shaking their heads. I looked downrange and it looked like a glacier all the way to the target. Dana said that the decision had been made to pretty much blow off the match. Lee Hachigian walked in dressed in his snowmobile suit. We all told a few stories, Gammon said he was heading out and I said "Heck, I'm pre-loaded and I want to shoot." Lee said "me, too". So did Dom and Quig, and the game was on.
We decided that we'd all throw $5 in the pot, bribe Wayne from the target crew to venture down-glacier and set up all five of the score targets, and then Lee had a better idea: "let's shoot five groups on one score target - one group on each bull, and that way Wayne only has to go downrange twice."
We then looked at the remote possibilty of augering the glacier to set wind flags. Since shooting over snow is, at best, a crap-shoot, I threw in the idea that we should forget the flags, too. Dom had a set of calipers so we had to eyeball the measuring. We had to take an outside-edge with the calipers and subtract .243, then add up all five to get a "best-guess" aggregate. We drew benches, set up our rests (after scaping the ice off the benches with a car scraper - standard equipment here in Michigan), and we set up to shoot. When we disucssed how long to run the match, Lee said he wanted to be home by 11:00 in order to get "wife brownie points"; so the time limit was set.
Dana gave the range command: "this is a half-hour, five-shot, five-group sudden-death match at 200 yards. Ready on the right ...."
Anyway, it was a hoot; espcially when you could hear guys in the background whining "where the Heck did that shot come from?" after every other shot. If you haven't shot over snow with no flags at 200-yards, you really haven't competed. One thing that it clarifies is that there is a lot of luck in this game when it comes to where that bullet ends up on the target. I've shot bigger agg.'s with wind flags and less mirage. There really wasn't too much of a question how many shots were on each target with the size of agg.'s we shot.
This is the real fun in benchrest: getting together and figuring out some game to compete for bragging rights. It truly was the best time I've had at a range in a long time.
