Most of the Sharpshooters had enough common sense to stay home, sleep late, and watch the rain pour down on Saturday, June 28. The first annual club picnic and celebratory match picked a crummy day, and the low-lying topography of the Aim Rite Range in Miller guaranteed a skim of about half and inch of water everywhere but in the shooting shelter. So that’s where we hung out, shot, and ate.
Club President Bill Corcoran was pretty much convinced that canceling the whole affair would be the wisest course, since it had been raining hard since about 3am. But at 7:15 Bill Baldwin called the President to inform him that he was just past Halltown, headed out Highway 96, and the rain had stopped. Since Bill B. was hauling a trailer with a grill, a picnic table, and other accoutrements for a picnic, it just didn’t seem right to cancel. If nothing else, the two Bills could grill about 40 hamburgers and spend a pleasant day watching the rain.
At the range, Jerry Patten and Pat Worley had already started getting things in order, and range-owner Leroy Kelley showed up to participate in the festivities, which mostly consisted of swatting mosquitoes and marveling at the rain pouring down. After a while, however, the rain ceased and a few more people showed up. Mountnie and Penny Beckham arrived in fine style, as did Matthew Simmons and his mother. Just as we were getting ready to run a shooting match, Chris Parrott ambled down the hill, and that meant we had too many people to shoot from under the small cover.
We decided laying or sitting on the ground wasn’t a bright idea, considering the amount of water flowing over the surface, so we agreed to shoot the match completely from the standing position. We set up right in front of the cover and commenced fire. After our first 10 round string we went down range to score and change targets, and everything seemed pretty normal. But in the middle of the second string a little light rain began to fall, so we decided that we’d leave the targets down range, sit under the cover, and finish our 3rd string on the same targets that already had the holes from the 2nd string. After a few minutes of laughing and telling jokes, the 3rd string commenced, and that apparently offended the gods of weather, because it began to rain in earnest. Now, if you go look at the match bulletin you will see that there are a few pretty good offhand shooters in the bunch at the picnic. But Jerry Patten was the only one that didn’t have a miss in the 3rd string of fire. You can safely say the conditions were challenging.
It rained so heavily, that upon completion of firing, we left the targets on the frames and commenced grilling burgers and bratwurst. The salads came out as did the home-made bread, and we finished with Chris Parrott’s home-made ice cream and Jerry Patten’s home-made red velvet cake (actually Jan Patten cooked it). Since we had enough food for approximately 30-40 people, and there were only 8 of us there, nobody went hungry.
One bolt of lightning cracked so close that a couple of us jumped a little, and one of us jumped a lot. Since nobody felt like walking down to score targets in the pouring rain, it was left to the match director to get in his truck and drive down to the targets where he laboriously scored each target by looking at it through a rain-streaked window. None of the shooters filed a challenge, and as far as we know, the targets are still hanging on the frames at the Miller range. Leroy said it was OK to leave them. In fact, Leroy suggested that we find another day to hold a match this year, gratis, since you could fairly say that this one was rained out.
If you didn’t attend, you missed a fun time. But I hope we don’t repeat it next year.
Bill Corcoran