We will be there.

We = Cav Arms staff and associated goons

Report from the match:

www.cavalryarms.com/vids/snow.wmv

Quite a few people are dropping out because of the weather conditions...I didn't do as well today because my hands were numb.   The goal is now to finish, and thus beat all those who quit.

The weather sucked all day Saturday.  I was cold and miserable and tired of waiting to shoot some stages, that I left.  The stages that I did shoot were fun and fast with low round counts, but my fingers too were numb and plus the snot dripping down from my nose didn't make it any more pleasant.  Oh well.  Watching it  snow in Mesa was cool though.....

I placed 100th/173 this year

I need to get some decent cold weather shooting gloves.

i sucked too, placed in the low 80's,  wasnt very happy with my performance, but just like the CUBS,  wait til next year.

our gallery is up:
www.cavalryarms.com/SMM3G/2006/SMM3G-2006-1.html

I got a lot less pictures this year than I normally would for 2 reasons

1) the weather, I didn't want to risk thousands of dollars in cameras to the elements
2) the stages were set up in a such a way it was difficult to photograph much.

I did get some cool footage on stage 2 putting the video camera down range on a tripod I will post later.

Here's my full After Action Report

This was the match’s first year under new management. That considered it ran fairly smooth in spite of the weather conditions.

The match began on Friday. High winds persisted throughout the day along with dust storms.

We had been without rainfall for over 140 days. Early Saturday morning the sky let loose with heavy constant rain fall throughout the day. Temperatures got as low as 37 Degrees, with snowfall for over an hour. The snow melted as soon as it got to the ground. Many shooters decided to quit, stages got backed up as targets needing constant replacing due to water saturation in spite of being covered with plastic bags. My squad got 3 of our 4 scheduled stages shot on Saturday. Other squads got only 1 or 2 stages done. The cold weather dramatically effected all of our shooting, reloading shotgun was a cause for much cursing and bleeding, and pulling the trigger became an exercise in squeezing your whole hand as your fingers went numb.

Sunday the weather cleared up, and shooting continued without much trouble.

The round count was lower than I would prefer, but the stages were well thought out with few traps or tricks for the shooters to deal with. One could easily progress through the stages and find the target by scanning for them without much difficulty. 7/10 stages were multi-gun. 7/10 were close quarters oriented, the rest being long-range (100-300 yards). Stage 1 required the use of a provided Surefire flash light. In my opinion the stages were the best they have been in a few years.

I particularly enjoyed the long-range stages. Out of all the stages these were the most fun. Unfortunately, Stage 5 was thrown out because of constant failures by the self re-setting targets being used. While we were waiting to shoot this stage I counted at least 3 times that the targets had to be repaired. These particular targets are constantly a problem, and yet they are used year after year. At least one previous year, a stage was thrown out because of problems with the same targets bogging things down. I would think they’d get the idea to stop using them at this point. To be clear, I am not blaming the targets…I am blaming whoever makes the decision to keep using them. We have 5 MGM Flash card targets, we will be happy to donate the use of these to the match next year if it keeps another stage from being thrown out. If shooters are taking too long on these stages a max time of 180 seconds should be set.

On stage 7 we were allowed to hot re-holster our sidearm if we so chose, a grounding area was also available to those who didn't want to. I hope we are allowed to do this on all stages in the future. I would also like to see shooters be allowed to use their own weapon mounted lights in the future, with no impact on class, and be allowed to remove them when not required by the stage without being considered reconfiguring the gun.

Next year I would like to shoot this match all in one day with the ROs. The round count is low enough and the stages short enough this should not be challenging. It would also be nice to avoid getting up so early 2/3 days and the nonsense associated with whatever hippy tree-hugger marathon of commerce disruption that is running every year on Sunday. In general I believe it would be a good idea if shooters could finish the match in 1 or 2 days rather than 3. Simply schedule all the out of town people to start shooting on Saturday, and all the locals start shooting on Thursday or Friday. Doing 6-8 stages in one day if not the whole match would be preferable to the amount of down time between stages and inconsistent start times every day.

The range officers of every stage are to be congratulated for doing their best to get every squad through in spite of the weather conditions. I am frankly impressed that it went as well as it did all things considered. The range officers were also helpful and friendly.

The prize table as usual was huge. I placed 100/173 in my class and I still received close to $200 retail value when it was my turn to walk the table. Even if you place low, you won’t feel like you wasted your time at SMM3G.

Music Video"Bad Blood" by Ministry
www.cavalryarms.com/SMM3G/2006/SMM3G-2006-MVLR.wmv

Quoted: Was that stage 3 you had the camera downrange on a tripod? Pretty cool stuff -- too bad it was near sunset, so the lighting kind of sucked.

Yep stage 3...not sunset....sunrise!  That was Sunday when we had to get there ridiculously early to avoid the road closures because of the marathon.

I'm going to try doing more video like that in the future...just have to find a good spot where people won't shoot the camera.

Quoted: Very deluxe video and stills, Russell. Did you convert everyone's times to an excel sheet so the classes could be compared?

No I haven't had the time for that...that'd be a much bigger task than doing it for one of the local matches.

The only stage we shot that didn't take a similar amount of time to shoot at the other stages was Stage 10, the shotgun speed shoot...if they did total time scoring I don't think it would have let any one stage dominate the match.