Wind flag questions
Thanks Mr. Allen, These are a few questions I'm working on right now. I can add more, but it's getting late in the day and I have to go shoot.
I'd probably start with understanding the scale of the shift in impact from a slight change in conditions. You can calculate the change in POI vs. POA at 100 yards given a consistent 1 mph cross wind as just under 0.1 inches, but that’s a 1 mph, 90 degree cross wind along the entire path from muzzle to target. (generic 68 gr 6 mm at 3200 fps) Given the fact that matches are won and lost over small shifts during maybe only a small length of that bullet’s path, I have to believe that ballistic calculations don’t apply here and don’t predict the real world shift.
If you’re shooting in perceived dead calm, but just as you’re about to pull the trigger, you see the feathery bearing mounted flag nearest the target gently rotate 60 degrees, and you touch the trigger anyway. From what I’ve read here, I understand that means you just dropped out of the top 20, maybe out of the top 50 – but practically speaking, just how much out of the .150 group you were working on does this last bullet strike?
Continuing along the same topic, some of the more innovative of this forum may have decided to try their hand a making their own wind flags. Perhaps those flags were not sensitive enough to changing conditions and didn’t react as quickly as some of the feathery, bearing mounted versions – is that much sensitivity required? On a “generally” calm day, the grass and trees are still – the homemade flags are practically inactive and the surveyor’s tape has an occasional flutter – do I need a flag that will show slight change in condition? You got to figure there are days when a sensitive flag would drive you nuts…because to a certain the extent the conditions never remain constant. Maybe a better question is what is a negligible shift in conditions?
When I first started shooting sporting clays, the variables seemed daunting. Unlike skeet where someone could tell you the lead at every station, in sporting clays your mind must put the unknown angle, distance, and speed of the target together somehow to make consistent shots. Worse, you often can’t see how you missed so much of the learning process is based only on what worked – IOW you can’t always learn from your mistakes. But over time, your mind develops an ability to calculate lead without trying to process each individual component (to varying degrees of success). Perhaps reading flags is the same - the answers to these questions will come with observation and experience, and maybe it can’t be explained, only experienced (or suffered, depending on your point of view).
Perhaps that little diversion into clay targets illustrates the concept I’m currently trying to reconcile in my mind. If I’ve got four flags out with the daisy wheels – one blade painted a contrasting color so I know they’re spinning at varying rpms – do we really process that “information” in preparation of our shots? Does the shooter look at each individual flag and make a calculated decision? Or is it like the successful wingshooter whose mind processes all the variables at once to make the split second decision – In other words, look at all the flags at once and trust his subconscious as to “what works”? Or are we using the daisy wheel only to reflect extremely minor wind movement that may be negligible according to how the earlier questions were answered?
I apologize in advance for the length of this post.
