Had a Cowboy shoot yesterday, including Pat Garrett with the extra rifle.
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Damned good fun
I loaded some .30-30 ammo on Friday night, 115gn cast bullets on 8gn of Trailboss. Tested them on Saturday morning at 1340fps and the bullets shot to point of aim at 25m and made circular holes in paper, then we did a pistol shoot in town. I helped a neighbour sort his dam water pump in the arvo so he could run his orchard sprinklers and then loaded 25 .30-30's for Pat Garrett.
The Cowboy shoot was good fun with most getting in some practice before the state titles at Little River in two weeks (March 7-10). Somebody had a case separation in .38 Special which was something I didn't think was possible. The rifle only extracted the rear 10mm of the case, like a Lee Enfield. My times weren't bad but I did have three misses (+5 seconds each) and three procedurals (shooting the targets in the wrong order +10 seconds each) which added 45 seconds to my overall match times. One of my misses was with the Rossi and I saw the bullet skim over the top of the plate by a millimeter, and one miss was because I left a round in one of the revolvers in a stage that was so confusing that I lost count
I also had one instance of fumbling the hammer and having to cycle the cylinder right around to fire the final round. And one stage had us only load eight in the rifle and put two on the table, forcing us to load two on the clock. My intention was to grab the two rounds in my left hand, empty the rifle then dump them in one at a time, but once I finished the pistols I grabbed the rounds and automatically fed them into the mag. I'll have to video practicing both ways but I'm sure I'm less likely to fumble it throwing singles in.
One stage I really liked had the plates spread about two metres apart (usually they're more like two feet apart) and we had to shoot them in order of far left, far right, mid left, mid right, then centre, first with the pistols, then double-taps with the rifle. Swinging your guns from side to side, and having the plates further back (around 8m) was a nice change of pace. The Pat Garrett stages had two extra plates back around 20m to engage with the "heavy" rifle.
Had my first go at the Fort Bridger Frenzy which is a lot of fun. You just have to put four bullets (five in each pistol and ten in the rifle) onto each of the five plates in whatever order you prefer, then load the coachgun and drop two steel poppers to finish. I managed to do it clean in 23.41 so I just need to halve that time and I'll be in with a chance of winning it
Although I still have aperture sights on both rifles I'm not using the sights so I haven't bothered removing them. The 24" Rossi is far too long for this stuff but the longer barrel does make it easy to reach Major Power factor for 3-Gun (180gn bullet at 1670fps), so I don't really want to get rid of it. I'm looking for a 16" Puma in .357 to go with it.
In Cowboy you are essentially shooting the same thing every time, generally five from each pistol, ten from the rifle and two from the gun. When the stage is "open" or linear it really is pretty easy, just start at one end and shoot them all as you move across them. But the trick is mixing up the order so you have to over-ride your natural tendencies, rhythms and learned behaviours. Automatically grabbing loose rounds and feeding them into the mag rather than hold them in your hand, or shooting the pistol targets right to left and rifle targets left to right, or double-taps from the rifle then single-taps from the pistols, for example. It's particularly a problem when you have any kind of issue that disrupts your rhythm, trying to remember at which point you were when you get back into action can be hard, and getting it wrong adds ten seconds on top of whatever time you lost fixing the problem.
It is bloody good fun though
