AAR: One-Day Appleseed, Azusa, CA 16 Jan 2016

[Rocket Man]

All right folks, time to kick off 2016 at Burro Canyon, our sixth and biggest year yet.  Ten events on the calendar, seven one-day Appleseeds and three Rimfire KD Advanced Appleseeds.  But this is the year of El Nino.  So what would the day hold?

Lucky for us, El Nino was El No-Show.  We got a little rain this weekend but none on our sunny little slice of heaven high in the San Gabriel Mountains.  Which is no surprise when you realize that we were in the presence of greatness.  Yes, you heard it here first:  For one thing, we were graced with a rare Kool-Aid sighting.  But that's just the beginning.  We also had on our line a direct descendant of Ol' Powderburn himself, Samuel Whittemore.   

Besides the Son o' Sam, we had seven other determined patriots arrive, a nice mix of folks from a husband-wife team to a brand new US Citizen fresh from swearing in.     The line was evenly split between .22's and .223 "Modern Muskets," and we tucked right in to work.  As always, I was flanked by stalwarts pennys_dad and BuckleNose, and a good thing too, since we had only a wee bit of daylight to pull it all together.  So, pull we did...

In the morning we introduced a great many people to the wonders of the loop sling, and had a couple of mechanical gremlins.  One of those gremlins manifested as a balky AR, and clearing it at one point resulted in an accidental bullet pull...    but we got it running.  Another was a relatively new shooter who was a bit mystified at the lack of groups, until we figured out that she had the gift of cross-dominant eyesight.     Well, it happens.  In fact we had THREE such "hybrid" shooters on the line, just one of them was a new discovery.  As always, learn to shoot opposite-handed, and it almost always works out, as it did here.  So by lunchtime we were ready to make some real progress.   

At lunch we mixed it up a bit, and I opted to tell the short version of the Three Strikes to leave some time to talk about Dangerous Ancient Dudes, with Mr. Whittemore front and center.  I don't know if anyone actually ate their lunch, or whether we all just filled up on history.     Luckily one eager if obvious student brought a big ol' sack of Apples, which were welcome.   

By closing time we all saw some major progress.  Fully half the class got the "Bonus Box" on our closing Redcoat!  And as for our scion?  Came within a whisker of cleaning that Redcoat, and he also shot an even 210 on our lone AQT  beating the class, even though it wasn't strictly timed.  But that just means, he'll have to come back...   

So far, so good. 2016 looks like a winner to me.  Thanks to all who turned out last Saturday -- clean safety record, clean shooting, clean fun.  Can't beat it.

So -- how was your weekend? 

[Slappy]

Sounds like you had a great time.  Really cool hearing about the ALL NEW American showing up.  As for my weekend...I knew going in, it was going to be a great AS indoors at CIPS in Illinois.  Day 1 saw me average ~185 on the three or four AQTs.  Day 2 morning started slow, but as the aftgernoon was winding down, I got in the bubble.  Second to last was a 195.  After some begging, Shooter 30-06 relented, and let us shoot one more.  That's the one that got me my orange hat with a 217.

So, it was a GREAT weekend!