I have been a SASS member for several years and today I finally joined the Lincoln County Regulators here in NM and shot my first match. First off, I have never met a friendlier and more helpful bunch of folks! Out of the blue, one of the guys just up and gave me a nice leather wrap for lever of my rifle. I am not sure where I placed as yet, but it was nowhere near the top, that's for sure.....A couple of the shooters were FAST and I mean FAST! There was one shooter that emptied his 73 lever action so fast that I think he had 10 empty casings in the air at one time....Did I mention these guys were FAST???
There were lots of beautiful guns being used. Most were shooting .45LC's, several were shooting .38 specials (The uber fast guys) and then me shooting .44 specials out of my .44 magnums. One guy was shooting a Kirst converted Uberti 1858 New Army with an 8" barrel in .45LC. His other revolver was a Uberti copy of an 1860 Colt Open Top also in .45LC. Out of the bunch, there was one guy shooting all .45LC black powder loads. It took a bit for the range to clear after his run.....
I learned that I need to tune up my shooting irons. My brand new Rossi 92 in .44 magnum failed miserably right out of the gate. I had shot one time before to get it sighted in and had no problems at all. However in the rifle stage of my first match, I had several failures to extract. It definitely needs the Steve's Gunz tune up kit with a new extractor/ejector spring. Lucky for me, I had brought along my Winchester 94 in .44 magnum as a back up. The 94 did fine, but I two occasions where I threw a live round out as I worked the action. This is apparently a common problem with the 94 action being too long for the pistol length cartridge.
My shotgun is an old 12 gauge double barrel Rossi "Overland Coach Gun" that I have had for many years. I think I need to have the chambers polished out a bit as the empties were sticking in them after firing. I did have one stage where I had some misfires, but a second strike set them off. I think that was due to cheap shotgun ammo (USA ammo from Big 5)..... Having to cock the hammers was time consuming compared to the hammerless double barrel shotguns. The shooters with the Norinco pump action 97's did not seem to have any advantage as they were limited to two rounds at a time....After the first two rounds, all of them utilized the "Combat load" technique of throwing the round into the open action, so effectively they were shooting a pump action single shot. One shooter had a reproduction 1887 lever action shotgun and he seemed to smoke pretty much everyone with it....
Both of my old Ruger Vaqueros worked great and I am very happy with them. I am running a 7-1/2" in a crossdraw rig and a 4-5/8" in my strong side rig. I never missed with my 7-1/2", but I did have a couple of misses with my 4-5/8". The longer barrels seem to just reach right out and tag those targets pretty easily. I have Bisley Vaquero with a 7-1/2" barrel that I had made up a couple years ago. I may end up using that instead of my 4-5/8" in future matches....
All in all, I had a great day and I am looking forward to my next shoot........