Sometimes it's easy to out-think yourself. The following is a synopsis of two really good ways to do it:

1) I took the 300WM out yesterday in less than Ideal conditions. The weather was perfect;but I was hurried. I forgot I had promised my wife I'd make some sort of finger food for a friends Halloween party and she called to remind me while I was driving to the shooting spot. Giving me about an hour and a half to shoot and get back home and start cooking. Under Normal circumstances I might have just turned around and went home; but, it's been about three weeks since I've shot and I normally go out 2 or three times per week. So my plan had to be reworked on the fly.

This weapon was built to try a couple competitions on is AZPRC which is run by a fellow named Brad Peck. Details can be found at www.Azprc.net . I haven't done it yet but I've talked to brad on the phone. He seems like a nice guy and their game sounds fun.

The other one is something my friends and I have just sorta come up with and it's really two different things but we usually do them on the same day: For the past couple years we've been littering a mountainside at our shooting spot with gongs made from AR500 steel plate. I stumbled on a large quantity a couple years back for a really good price and every once in a while I'll cut out a 1 MOA gong, build a frame to hang it from, and drag it out on the mountain and place it. The first part of our informal game is to pick a shooting location and shoot each target twice up and down doing the whole series for time. The second part involves engaging specific targets from different locations, again for time. This involves running with your rifle and whatever else you may need to the different locations. Admittedly we keep this distances limited because the terrain is very rough and though fit, we're all old.

The object of all the games is you either hit or you don't so I'm tuning for hits instead of groups, though good groups should mean hits?

2) Don't be swayed by velocity. I know this well; but, I ignored it and went for something that looked interesting but I kinda knew wasn't right. When I shot the 600+ yard ladders, they showed a really good node. Just above this node I noticed there was an area where five shots of the same charge made almost a straight line. I interpreted this as good even though it was outside the area where three different loads put five rounds each (for a total of fifteen rounds) into a total vertical span of two inches at 695 yards. I shoulda went with what the data said instead of getting greedy and going after the extra hundred feet per second.

Here are a couple groups shot yesterday. They aren't spectacular but they were shot under various types of stress. Either trouble with the wife (very scary) or actual physical stress.

Here is a ten shot rapid fire at 200 yards after running two hundred yards through the woods.

[img width=600 height=439]http://lh6.ggpht.com/_5kErdS37uEg/TM8Oeo0s_6I/AAAAAAAAANI/TVOXSYWU7vE/s640/IMG_4363.JPG[/img]

Even though the weapon isn't being set up for this kind of thing, here is a 5 shot at a tick over 100 with my impending doom because just before I shot it I looked at the clock and realized I was about 35 minutes behind my wife's schedule.

[img width=600 height=307]http://lh5.ggpht.com/_5kErdS37uEg/TM8O3-x650I/AAAAAAAAANM/AcSpiSHLlwg/IMG_4365.JPG[/img]


I think the bottom line here is that I didn't really glean much from yesterday's endeavor................But I did get to shoot so it was a great day! :)