Well, I actually only intended to shoot one rifle. I carried the other as a "backup" in case something happened to the "primary" rifle. I hadn't even loaded any new ammo for the backup rifle, and was intending to shoot left over ammo in case of an emergency. Some was in older lots of brass from last year and some from this year.
On the way to the range I started thinking about what I was going to need to do in the off season, and realized that I needed to empty the old ammo so that I could anneal the brass. I thought "what the heck", I might as well shoot it in the match as a useful way of unloading the odd lots. There were 2 different lots of of powder, 3 lots of bullets, 2 different seating depths, and various neck thicknesses and lengths. Altogether I shot ammo from six different boxes (some boxes had 10-30 loaded rounds, and one box only had 2). This motley conglomeration of loads ended up shooting better than the other carefully loaded rounds in my primary rifle
. The 2 non-X's were agonizingly close to making it a 25X. Go figure
.
I guess I just got a little overconfident, and a LOT impatient at 200 yards, and thought I could hold for some heavy mirage and switchy wind (by now I was running pretty low on ammo for the backup rifle, and had to conserve on the sighters)
. The conditions, and the "range gremlins" proceeded to show me that I was very wrong, as I dropped a point on my first target with the primary rifle, and on the second target with the backup rifle
.
Another "learning experience" at the range
.
Jim
