The last match before the World shoot was held in May in Christchurch.
They call it the Quake City shoot, there were 12 stages to be shot over the weekend. The match officials had their chance on the Friday, which I managed to get down and watch the afternoons work. This is meant to be a test run to make sure everything goes the way they wanted.
Saturday was clear and cold. Stages 1 to 4 were run on ranges normally used for ISSF, these were all on the smaller side as there are restrictions on the direction and angles that we can shoot. An interesting twist is someone years back had carpeted the ground with lots of small chip, so that when you try and move fast it’s like running in soft sand, the harder you try, the more we sink which slows our movement and speed. As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, speed is very important for good results. Over the weekend, they put together some good stages that had more than one way to compete. This lifts the challenge of working out the best and fastest way for each of us to complete them as efficiently as possible for our skill set. This also tests memory and the ability to come up with a plan and stick with it. It’s also a required skill to be able to change your thinking on the run, because even the best laid plans seem to fall apart very quicky at times. In my opinion these are the best kind of stages as it gives us more opportunity than when it is a follow the leader stage doing the same thing.
We have moving targets as well as lots of steel plates, and one even did both at the same time, two round plates at around 20 meters on a slider which was activated by shooting another steel target that had to fall to activate the slider which was only in view for a limited time. It was either a success or a disaster, but they were kind to us and only had it on a smaller point stage, so if it didn’t work out it wasn’t a match ending screw up. Although that didn’t stop a lot of head shaking and swearing for missing. All in all, it was a good test of skills with some longer-range work, plenty of penalty targets that were very expensive when hit. It’s all about shooting as fast as possible but with no misses or penalties, sounds easy and in some ways, it is, but being faster and straighter than everyone else, now that’s not so easy.
It was good to catch up with friends from all over the South. The numbers from the North Island were low as some of them are a bit soft and they find the weather in the South too cold for them, the joke this time was on them as it was hot.
