Charlottesville, VA 7-8 NOV AAR

[FiremanBob]

Sixteen great Americans enjoyed a full weekend of marksmanship and citizenship development, complete with challenges to overcome thanks to Mother Nature. Everyone did so with great style. We were privileged to have a patrol of Boy Scouts with us. I must thank the Scout leaders who, like Appleseed instructors, earn the big bucks doing the hard work. I'd love to have Scouts at every event.

It was also a great privilege for me to award Misawa with his Red Hat on Sunday.

Saturday was tough with the cold rain most of the day, and I was much impressed by the good cheer and hardiness of everyone on the line. Still, it's hard to focus on performing new skills when everyone and everything is damp. Sunday was beautiful and a thoroughly enjoyable day. Due to club rules that prevent live fire until 1:30 pm, we had a productive morning working on dry fire NPOA and 6 Steps exercises in all the positions. Everyone made great improvements in their skills over the weekend. High score was Jim's 208 at the end of Sunday.

We learned an important lesson on Sunday's first Redcoat: .22LR ammo isn't waterproof. A number of the Scouts' ammo boxes were damp and became waterlogged overnight. Several students had complete FTF malfunctions. We opened a few of the rounds and found that the powder had turned to mud inside the case. "Keep your powder dry" goes back to flintlock days, and it's still true today.

I believe there will be photos in a following post.

[The Wolfhound]

I have the picture of Misawa getting his Red Hat posted in the Virginia forum: https://appleseedinfo.org/smf/index.php?topic=47185.0