Atlanta Conservation Club held their first Single Stack & Production USPSA match yesterday (yes Tam, yesterday was my birthday) so I headed out to Atlanta to do some shooting with the ParaUSA LTC Gun Blog 9mm. Now, shooting a 9mm in Single Stack has two side effects: 1) you have to be more accurate but just as fast, because you’re shooting Minor as opposed to Major; 2) people will call you a girl.
The fact that you’re shooting Minor has a trade-off though, in that you’re allowed to put more bullets in the gun – so a Single Stack gun shooting Major is capped at 8+1, but shooting Minor you’re capped at 10+1. This changes the reload strategy for people shooting Minor, and depending on the stage layout allows you to shoot more without having to reload. This particular match had pretty “obvious” reload points though, so gaming out the reloads for Minor didn’t really grant a competitive advantage.
The match itself was fun, and also kind of weird – a lot of the stages were reminiscent of IDPA-type scenario stages. On the first stage, you had to shoot one handed while transporting a heavy package from point A to point B, and somehow reload without breaking the 180 or sweeping yourself. I shot this stage clean for points, but took too much time to do it, so my hit factor was pretty low. The next stage was shooting through a barrel at 4 steel targets and 4 paper targets – I was clean on this stage as well, but too slow again so my hit factor wasn’t where I needed it to be.
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| From 07-12-2009 Single Stack |
There’s one of our shooters going through the barrel at the far corner targets.
There were a couple of pretty standard USPSA style stages, which I did alright on, but then the stage where I really let it all out was on the stage called Breakout. The set up for this stage is that you were handcuffed around a post with your gun in front of you. Here’s the RO putting the cuffs on the shooter, and the shooter’s hand position so you can see the bracelets.
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| From 07-12-2009 Single Stack |
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| From 07-12-2009 Single Stack |
On this stage, my small stature was actually an advantage, as I had much less trouble maneuvering around the pole while shooting the COF, and managed to take full match points on this stage among Single Stack shooters. I finished 4th out of the Single Stack shooters, and 5th in the unofficial combined match results, which really isn’t to bad considering I never really felt like I was “in the zone” the entire match.
It was nice to get out and shoot a gun other than a revolver – I’ve been spending a lot of time putting rounds through revolvers lately, so the transition back to a single action gun was actually quite easy.
Next week I start training for the Maryland NRA Action Pistol Championship – I’ve got a month to practice, and my goal is to improve the score I shot at Bianchi Cup. I want to get into the 1500-1600s at this match, and with the lessons learned from Bianchi, I think it’s a reasonable goal.
