Yesterday, I shot Mr. Completely’s E-Postal match, called “High Fives”. It’s five shots offhand, and five shots from a rest at a bull that is slightly smaller than a dime. At 30 feet. When I was reading about it online I was thinking that “oh, this should be easy” completely forgetting that none of my current pistols are set up for this kind of a bullseye match.
I fearlessly headed to the local range with my 1935 Beretta, my Taurus Tracker, and my Walther P22 (3.4 inch barrel). Not exactly target guns; and nary an optical sight to be found. Of the three, the Taurus has the best trigger pull, as the single action let-off is crisp and pleasant. For ammo, I had a box of Wolf Gold .32 ACP (brass cased), Magtech 148 grain Wadcutters for the Taurus, and Aguila Sniper Sub Sonic for the Walther P22.
I had fortunately printed some extra targets for the match to use as sighters, because when I rolled those targets out to 30 feet, it suddenly occurred to me exactly how small that little tiny black dot was. Really, really, really small. I found myself wishing for A) an optical sight or B) my old Pardini Free Pistol.
After sighting everything in, first up was the Taurus Tracker. It’s a .357 Magnum, 7 shot revolver with a four in barrel and adjustable sights. I shot the the targets left to right, top to bottom. Here’s the scan of the target. I’m less than thrilled with my overall performance on that target; I’ll probably shoot this one again with a different load. I was rather upset with the shot on the bottom left target, it was one of those where it’s taking too long to break. Of course, instead of putting the gun down and focusing, I committed the cardinal sin of bullseye shooters and forced the shot.
Next up was the ’35 Beretta. The Beretta has “sights” only in the technical definition that there is a groove and a post on the slide, but that’s about it. Considering the rudimentary sights and the less-than-stellar trigger, I’m relatively pleased with my performance. I did manage to throw some shots into oblivion on the bottom right target, but it is what it is.
The final gun was my P22, and I couldn’t be happier with my shooting there. I managed to only drop 9 points on this target, which attribute to nothing other than poor trigger control on the offhand portion of the event. Interestingly, the 60 grain Aguila rounds were silly accurate out to 10 yards.
I had a tonne of fun shooting this match, so much so that I’m going to haul my other pistols out to the range in two weeks and shoot it again with my other handguns.
