I read in Da_Bunny's thread some concerns about 2008's length of fire.

2008 was hampered by a couple of historical artifacts; the biggest one is the hours it takes us to clean up the hill after the shoot. There was a storm forecast to move in that evening, which would have impacted our ability to safely clean the hill. Furthermore, we tend to call the shoot once explosions fall off to one every five minutes or so.

There are a couple things that happen at the close of the event. Once the line is cold and guns are packed up, we send volunteers up to the eyebrow to work the hillside for explosives and metal. As a reward for this, they get to shoot whatever explosives are left over; for this, we have to make the hill cold again. Once that's over, we go over the hill one more time to look for any spilled explosives and any missed steel.

While this is ongoing, we have to clean the shooting line, pick up garbage, and the like.

For 2009, we did things differently. For one, Joe's son-in-law camped on the site overnight to handle secondary cleanup and security; this let us shoot later.

That said, we're always open to feedback about what we could do better. I was impressed at how well the shooters did at picking off the targets at 670 yards or so hanging from paracord. The morning targets were all 4" targets; the afternoon ones were mostly 3" targets.

We can't open it much earlier, as we have people on the hill pretty much all morning from sunup setting stakes and the like. We'd like to do it in the summer, but we can't do it during fire season.

My big ask for attendees is what do you want changed? What could we do better? What would make your life easier?

I don't recall who commented about the 308 - but 308 is marginal. Looking at 223, it's good (>1500 FPS) to 400 yards. 308, about 600 yards - this is the bottom of the hill (550-600 yards). Beyond that, you're really lobbing them in and if you do hit, they're out of steam. To detonate targets all the way to the eyebrow (700 yards), you really need a 300 WM or greater.

So, have at it. I flew the BFL all weekend and the only people that asked about it didn't recognize it; I was expecting more arfcommers to at least stop by and tell me how much I suck.

This was my 1st Boomershoot and before I comment let me say it was nice to see many strangers from all over having a good time doing a bit of long range shooting. We had a blast, been a long time since I reached out to 6-700 yards.

Some things I'd recommend are:

Starting on time.
A 15 minute warning before final cease-fire.
Checking into whether the mixture can be sensitized a bit more (yes I shoot .308).
Description of the various shooting lanes. The prone only spots may surprise folks (it did us).
A few more flags at 200, 350, and 500 yds.
(Warm) clothing recommendations on the website/signup.

A sore point for both of us.

Excellent idea.

It can be; the issue is failure mode and cost. There is a band where the mix gets very failure-prone below about 1350 fps - it needs to be carefully mixed. The failures tend towards the "bursts into robust fire" type; the careful mixing leads to very long prep times. That said, fewer "it just dumped all over the ground" failures is something we shoot for every year.

The entry website contains pictures from each lane, as well as describing the equipment required for each lane. That said, it took me a little bit just now to figure out where to get those pictures and descriptions. The pictures will be replaced with higher-resolution ones soon; what would you like the text to say?

certainly. the flags were the ones left over from the clinic - I realized, later, that we hadn't set out our flags. My mistake.

We can do more of that. I thought the day was fairly nice, but it ranged from freaking frigid to balmy as the day went on.

Thanks for showing up; if you think of anything else, let me know.

PS: Joe just posted some thoughts on capacity as well; we're out of bandwidth for food, too.