11 Patriot Americans came out to Douglas Ridge Rifle Club for the first KD event of the year. Thanks to DRRC for letting us schedule 3 KD events at the range this year.
The sound of 11 center fire rifles shooting stage 2 and 3 of the AQT is truly a glorious noise, and brings a smile to my face.
Mother Nature was kind to us this week, even with a fairly ugly weather forecast. We only got some light sprinkles in the morning of both days. By mid-morning, everything dried up and we had perfect shooting weather. The wind kicked up a little on Friday, but it was out of our 5 o'clock position so it did not affect the shot groups, or teach wind deflection, but it also did not teach wind deflection.
The students were very attentive during the instructional periods on Thursday and put the AS techniques to good use. We had three new KD rifleman and two repeat KD rifleman. Congratulation to Mervin, Randy and Cliff for collecting their new patches, and to Sara and Devon for demonstrating their skills.
Sara was shooting for her Distinguished patch, and shot the event high score of 238. Oh, so close!
I did not talk enough about the power of dry fire practice. It is easy to perfect your shooting techniques on the comfort of your living floor. With an unloaded and safe rifle, you can perfect your trigger control, steady hold factors and NPOA shifts at home. A laser pointer will help reinforce the practice as you can watch the laser dot during the practice. You can watch the laser dot as you squeeze the trigger to smooth the trigger break. You can watch the dot become more steady as you learn to relax into the steady hold factors. The laser can also help reinforce NPOA shifts and the verification of NPOA. If you practice these techniques and come back to another AS event, I am confident you will see an improvement in your AQT scores.
I enjoyed spending the couple days with all of you, and I am looking forward to seeing you all at another AS event.
In Liberty,
Prescott
Here are the photos I took during the event.
Great event, and thanks for all your hard work.
It occurs to me after the fact that, while running stages 1-3 without checking targets certainly speeds things along, it somewhat diminishes the quality of the feedback that students are getting as to how well what they did on each stage worked.
Douglas Ridge, with its moving firing line, does present a time challenge... perhaps we could brainstorm some way to leverage cell phone pics and a small pit crew in the future?