On a sunny, cool beginning of Labor Day weekend, thirty competitors took part in the 2019 Michigan Mid-Range Prone Championship at the Midland County Sportsman’s Club.
The day resulted in some outstanding performances. Jack Abrams won the Any Rifle (Any sight sling shooters) with a 595-29X. Jack used a scoped rifle with LoaderMonkey ammunition. In second was Steve Bair with a 595-19X using an iron sighted Palma Rifle. A great performance by both.
In the F-TR Category, Sydnie Lipski, a Junior from Hubbard Lake bested the field with a 590-30X, beating second place shooter Austin Nelson with a 589-26X by a single point and four X’s.
F-Open was won by repeat winner Marcel Bollinger with a 595-29X leading Ed Gostomski’s 590-24X. Notably, the conditions must have been worse that last year, Marcel had posted a clean 600, a year ago.
We had a few bumps in the road during the match, but we may have learned from them. At 300 yards, we were unable to open the file folder on the running access point. So there was no way to see past strings. We were concerned that this might be the precursor of worse things to come, so we switched over to another access point for 500 yards. Unfortunately, for reasons that we suspect, but have not yet been confirmed, that access point was displaying shots 20-30 seconds after the round was fired. At 600 yards we went back to the original access point and performance once again jumped to 1-2 seconds for each shot. We still couldn’t open the files folder, but the performance was excellent. We are exploring with the Shot Marker manufacturer why that might be.
Way on the right on target eight, Ray Gross and Leo Cebula were getting wide unexplained shots at 500 yards. Since I’m old enough (Leo) to not always see well, I attributed it to my vision. However, Ray was using a scoped AR, and had no trouble seeing. After a little detective work we realized our bullets were penetrating the lower foliage of the tree on the far right of the range. Ray removed some lower branches and leaves before the 600, and I (Leo) was able to shoot a decent 600. Ray, firing an AR, that was likely not as flat as my 80.5 Bergers at 3050 fps, shot his string on target 3. Both of our scores were dramatically higher. I think this means its time for some more landscaping at Midland. At least on Target eight.
2019 Michigan Mid-Range Prone Championship
Our next Suburban Mid-Range Prone League match is on September 21, 2019. The program is here: 2019 Suburban Mid-Range Prone Championship
