The Carbine Match

The Carbine Match went a bit longer than expected and I did not make it home in time to get to the birthday party. V left me with a shopping list, so after my shower I went out and bought the rest of the food for the pool party later this afternoon. On the bright side I have a couple quiet moments to report on the match.

We shot six stages and went through a little over a hundred rounds of ammunition. Twenty four shooters showed up, and we split into two groups. I think that I ended up in the more interesting of the two groups. We had a wide range of firearms and skill sets on the line, and everyone got along very well. In our group we had one shooter with a lever action, and one with an M1 Carbine. The rest of us shot AR's of one sort or another. Most folks had flat tops with optics, a couple of us had A1/A2's with iron sights.

The lever action fell out midway through the match with what appeared to be a pretty serious failure of his firearm. Hopefully it appeared worse that it was and turns out to be an easy fix. One individual had a squib load. Thankfully the bullet cleared the barrel, the action did not cycle. I think the M1 Carbine had a stove pipe, but I was not standing where I could see and tell for sure. I am happy to say that the problem I had with the trigger pin last week is well and truly resolved, it did not move a bit and my Mixmaster Dissipater functioned flawlessly.

When I showed up to this match, I had two goals. I did not want to get any procedural errors, and I did not want to put any holes in the "no shoot" targets. After the walk through, I added a third goal. One of the stages included firing three shots at a hostage taker from a kneeling position around cover at 25 yards. I very much wanted to do good on this one target, and I did. That made my whole day.

If you can't tell, I had a blast. We got to shoot moving targets, and at targets while moving. We shot prone, kneeling, standing, walking and crouching. It turns out that I did not need the drop leg ammo pouch after all, but don't tell V that. I bought it, so it is getting used.

The guys at Cross Timbers IDPA did a great job with this match. This was their (I can soon say our as I am joining CTIDPA) first Carbine Match, and I thought it ran very smoothly. The pre-match training that was held last weekend was a very good idea and went a long way towards helping those of us who had not done this sort of thing before fit right in.