Saturday was the Main Match at Thunder Valley, and the weather could not have been nicer. Bright sunshine, slight breeze, low humidity, and 70 degrees, but as nice as the day was, the shooting was just plain ugly.

Jose won third place in Duelist and even though he didn’t shoot great he had only 1 blowup and that was mitigated by some of the worst spotting I have ever seen. So overall he didn’t do to bad and got the third place ribbon.

Bison Bud was on hand and from the very beginning I knew I couldn’t win gunfighter. That’s not the best attitude to have, but it was the truth. Bud’s pistol work doesn’t intimidate me, but his rifle is about as good as it gets, and with me still shooting a 92 I knew there was no way. So I figured it was between me and Rapid Lee for second. By the end of the first 3 stages Rapid Lee was clean and shooting in the low 30’s. I couldn’t seem to get in gear with times in the low to mid 30’s and I already had 2 misses. So after the break I made up my mind to shoot as fast as I could, and I did.

My first stage after the break was stage 7 and I managed to run 10 pistol, 10 rifle, and 4 shotgun in 29.?? seconds, clean. That’s only the second time I’ve shoot a stage under 30 as a gunfighter and the first time using a 92. I was pretty pumped after that stage and we moved on to stage 8, Stage 8 consisted of 10 pistol, 10 rifle, and 2 shotgun. I managed to run a raw time of 23.?? Seconds, with one miss! That was the best stage I have ever shot.

So now I had 3 mediocre to poor stages and 2 great stages so I moved on to the sixth stage of the day, and that one brought me back to reality. I was on a great pace, shooting fast and moving well, but I threw one of my rifle rounds, and when I transitioned to my pistols things got out of hand. I missed every pistol shot with my left hand, but with each shot instead of slowing down and correcting my error I kept speeding up, by the end I was laughing and whooping and so was the rest of the posse. If you gotta go down, go down in flames! I still ended up with a time in the low fifties, even with 6 misses (5 sec. penalty for each miss)!

Of course Bison Bud won first in Gunfighter, and Rapid Lee, who shot great all day, took second place. I ended up with the third place ribbon and against those two guys I guess that isn’t too bad. One of these days I going to put together a whole shoot, 7 stages of great shooting, and when I do you’ll all hear about it.

So the day had its good and bad spots, but most of the time it just felt like people had their head up their kazoo. Spotting was poor to nonexistent, people wouldn’t listen, a few wanted to argue, and the easiest scenarios seemed to cause the most confusion. Still I always say a bad day at the range is better then most good days anywhere else.