Joe,
All kidding aside, I tried doing the towel thing again with my Theoben ...and it's 16mm barrel.
First thing that happened, I forgot to make sure it was pulled back far enough before taking the first shot, so now there's a new hole
in my towel. Luckily this happened before I went down onto my scoring targets as the shot went low and way right by 1 1 /2 target boxes.
Then, my second target didn't go all that great, but I didn't realize why until after I had removed the towel ( and its ±4 or 5# of weight as it was dripping wet) before shooting the third target as the rain had let up a bit, then proceeded to have to readjust my scope
down at least 6 to 8 clicks as the barrel had sprung back up after removing all that extra weight. I can't even imagine the amount of extra stress that was being added as the wind was blowing the towel, and all that weight around pretty good.
I figure the best discription of the day would be from a Copy-N-Paste of an email I sent out to Al Hadfield this morning which read:
Al,
You wouldn't have believed how much worse things got for our afternoon session. According to Weather Underground we were all facing into (literally) a 9 to 12 MPH breeze with gusts as high as 16 MPH during the morning. But, that quickly got turned up to a more than miserable 13 to 17 MPH wind, with gusts as high as 30 MPH, for us Puffgunners in the afternoon. And guess what? These little 10 to 18 grainers kind of get blown around a little more than those 40 grainers we were shooting in the morning!
Thank God we weren't trying to stretch the Airguns out to a full 50 Yards as I'm afraid we'd have had trouble finding the paper, let alone each individual target. Plus, during the afternoon it got to raining one heck of a lot more than in the A.M, meaning everything got that much wetter and making it so that the word "fun" almost got dripped right out of the equation.
By the end, the range was covered with puddles, and the targets got so mushy that their own weight and weakness began to cause them to fall off of the backers. And those last few targets sure were fun to score!
Oh well, it was still more fun than just sitting around the house on Father's Day, that's for sure. Now everything's lying around the shop all disassembled and spread out to dry. But, the good news is: they're saying that for our Pinnacle match next Saturday it's supposed to be sunny and in the mid-80's. We'll see!
See you then.
Dave
Now, as for those pictures Paul and Al posted, especially the one showing the range: that stuff that looks like fog isn't! What it is is
RAIN that was blowing straight into our faces, and all over our equipment, all day long. And, I have to agree with Paul. In my 15 years of shooting these were the worse combination of conditions that I've ever been faced with. The weather men actually had it right for a change as they had perdicted a true Nor'Easter, that is other than for having rain instead of snow.
