Sam's Gap at Sunset

As Geoff and I started down the long, sweeping grade back into North Carolina on the new I-26, the memories from the 108th certainly left a pleasant feeling in their wake: good people, good shooting, good camp fires, and at least better weather than the recent unpleasantness in the spring!

While the medals weren't plentiful, all the team matches were far from pitiful, and we did snag a few trophies for various National cases.

You'll want to remember fondly the good old days of our 'A' Pistol Team being in Class 'A-2', because this time, Bob Currie, Shane Parris, Todd Wenzel, and Shelby Hilton turned in a 174.9 second match and walked away with 1st Place! And right on their heels, Dave Jackson, Dean Baehman, Allen Owens and John Long's 182.5 brought them 2nd Place 'B', 0.9 seconds AHEAD of third, a much better place to be than 0.8 BEHIND!

And in another Bunny First: both teams finished both the Hanging Pigeons and the 4" Tiles!

Saturday of course brought the Carbine match, which got off to a somewhat rocky start. Our not-too-great 214 second (fired) Pigeon Board got turned into a whopping 321 second event when some boot-recruit named "Rollin" flunked the associated trigger test. I'm proud to say of my fellow team-mates that we came back on the 4" tiles and whipped the hell out of EVERYBODY in our class (A-2), as well as 27 of the 40 Class A-1 teams! But, when all was said and done, our 817.6 second time got us to 22nd Place.

"MAKE READY!"

The canon crew's joy at being placed next to another fairly small field piece on position two lasted all the way to the firing of the first round. I don't know what those boys were running in that thing, but it sounded like about 50 pounds of smokeless!

Once again, Daisy kicked off the Canon Match by putting the first two rounds under the frame! The windage held throughout the match... maybe we just need to hold a bit higher?? Oddly enough, our resulting 39-0v netted us the same place as Spring's lesser score of 35-2v: 14th Place (Rifled).

It seems like more and more I get to write up wonderful things about our teammates and the Fall National Opening Ceremony. Garnell Jackson was completely bowled over when she became the first woman in Skirmishing History to be awarded the Distinguished Skirmisher Award!! This was voted on at the August Board Meeting (and Dave actually managed to keep the secret!) and presented to Garnell before the entire membership for her hours and hours of work at Doc's Place as well as her tireless picture contributions to The Skirmish Line. Way to go, Garnell!

On the heels of her newly-acquired award came the finest performance she has EVER turned in at a National Musket Match, handily leading the B team with 17 hits!

The 'A' Team also produced some outstanding marksmanship. It's interesting to note that, out of all competing teams, we came in 17th place in our traditional-nemesis-event: the Pigeon Board. Also, take a look at the Parris Shooting Machine that anchored the left end of the line. Two misses between the two of them in the first three events, and Shane wound up missing only three shots throughout the match! (I know Mike wants me to mention that Shane missed before he did, but just to spite Dad I'm not going to.)

The 'A' team came in 19th place after Phase 1 and finished 20th overall after Phase 2. Please note that this time, we were NOT beaten by anybody's 'B' teams! Our own 'B' Team did quite respectfully, finishing up in 31st place in B-1 and 161st out of 233 overall.

Great shooting, everybody!