05-May 27, 2018

What a great way to spend the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, enjoying a beautiful summer day, with friends participating in one of our favorite sports, Field Target competition. It was the perfect setting to allow us to reflect on all the great individuals that have gone before us, making incredible sacrifices and enduring unthinkable hardships so that we could enjoy this lovely day. What a wonderful heritage we have.

The day started with cool temperature and mild winds. The browning of California has begun with the beautiful greens of only a few weeks ago being replaced by the sun-dried fields of summer. The day would turn into one of warmest of the year with temps reaching into the high 80s by the end of the match, bringing with it the beloved switching winds Ione is so famous for.

We had 19 shooters show up for the match, most came early to help with the set up which went very quickly. We were able to get the match started by 9:20 a.m. Scott, our match director, set a deceptively difficult course, proving that you do not need a lot of 50 yard targets to challenge the shooters. Small KZs in the wind are ego crushers.

About halfway into the match, correlating perfectly with the rise in wind velocity you could begin to hear the bewilderment in the shooters voices! "I have no idea where that pellet went", "Did the wind really switch 180 while I was breaking that shot", "What was that", etc. It was a tough day, but everyone had a lot of fun. When the scores were tallied you could see the pain was spread equally around, but our two national champions remained on top with Riz and Scott shooting the best two scores of the day followed closely be several PCP shooters. The piston gang also posted some great scores for the conditions with Charlie maintaining his place at the top and Ken posting one of his better scores coming in second.

After the match we enjoyed a traditional Memorial Day lunch of hot dogs, potato salad, chips, cookies and sodas. It must have been good as all I took home was a little bit of left over potato salad. Thanks to all who came out and enjoyed the day with us. We really appreciate your support.

Jim in Sacramento