It's quiet around here. Too quiet. So:
Well, here it is next year, and it was "better," at the Quigley, I have to agree.
Rangemaster duties were pretty much down pat, and the Scorekeepers do all the heavy lifting, anyway. I got squadded perfectly with my shooting partner, so could concentrate better on the shooting. It was a Paper Patch Extravaganza; I fired 150 shots this year. The Paper Patch Bullet shooters are still a minority, noticed and whispered about by the other shooters.
The wind was pretty bad the first day; almost like the wind conditions of the legendary Quigley of Ought-Twelve. The dust wasn't quite as visible, but it got all over everything anyway. The second day started out relatively calm, but the wind picked up again pretty quickly. My shooting partner had to fire one of his relays in the rain; one cloud's worth came by at just the "right" time.
I got a 21, not my best, but equivalent to a couple previous scores with grease groove boolits, and I'm proud to say that I tied with the Third Place Small Fry shooter. However, I did manage to exceed the Match "average" of 19, and I've never despised a C+ in school if the subject was difficult enough. Best I did was 5 on any one target and the worst was 2. The wind was really getting to everybody (almost). Lots of "Nice Tries!" at the end of the relays from the Scorekeeper. They said at the Awards Ceremony that they saved a lot of money on Straight-8 Pins this year. But some people got them. One of the guys in a relay I was Rangemastering got two Pins on two successive targets. Even with the gale conditions, you had to be well up into the 30's to get much of anything in the award line. Dave Gullo won overall with an incredible 43, five shots above the second place winner, IIRC.
I had three slightly different boolits loaded over the same 80-gr Swiss 1Fg powder charge. All from Brooks moulds, this year: a 0.440", a 0.441+" and boolits from the 0.441+" that I had lapped out to 0.443". Weights went from 543 to 547 gr. In practice and sight-in Thursday and Friday, all diameters and weights seemed to shoot to the same elevation, except for the Buffalo, which required a minute or so difference between the heaviest and lightest. I also had a few experimental loads of 80 gr 1-1/2Fg Swiss over the same boolits. They seemed to shoot as well as the 1F loads, except that for every target I tried them on, they shot about the height of that target high. Looks like I found another load that works, anyway.
The bore-pig and dry patch cleaning routine suggested by Brent went without a hitch, and was easy to accomplish in the time I had between shots. There were occasional slight smears of fouling in the rifling ahead of the chamber after one of these wipes, but there didn't seem to be any elevation change or accuracy difference between these and a mirror bore, at least on these targets. I would, of course, run a second pig&patch if there was time, but if I had to adjust the sight setting, or consult with my spotter, sometimes I just had to take the shot when it came up. It went where it was called, anyway.
My homemade mouth reducing die let the shell hold the boolit securely without appearing to damage the accuracy. I think they're in there good enough so I can put them in my uber Cool C. Sharps cartridge belt and parade around with them next year. The only mystery to me is why I could take any one of these loads, and morning and afternoon, on two practice days, hit the Octagon with monotonous regularity, and yet get only two hits when the chips were really down. I also sighted in during the pre-Match practice session on the Diamond, two hours before I was to shoot for real, and got twelve hits out of fourteen, but no pin when the nitty got gritty. Well, that's one reason I keep coming back, I guess.
The people at the Goex table now have added 1Fg to their list of Olde Eynsford granulations, as a result of the comments from users at last year's Quigley. I got 5 lb of the stuff for paper patch and grease groove trials. It's nice that these people respond to customer wishes. I think I can make this stuff work; it seems the barricades are gradually crumbling. More and more, the criticality of variations in boolit diameter, design; even weight (within reason); patch thickness and bore wiping seem to be getting lost in the "noise," where before, everything seemed to make a huge difference. Maybe it wasn't all that critical in the first place, although at the time it certainly seemed so. Kind of like swimming, or driving, or playing the piano. After a while, you just "do it."
I've done one Silhouette match with Paper Patch and didn't get much of a score, but I think I'll concentrate on using them now and see if the scores get better. I'll probably stick with the 0.443" diameter, just for consistency.