My wife really does love me! So we got home from our Anniversary fishing trip and get-away in the middle of the afternoon. We did a few things around the house and then relaxed. Jean was going to head over to some friends to help with some post surgical care and spend the night. So with nothing planned, Jean getting ready to leave, and a few hours of daylight left I asked if she minded if I went shooting. She didn’t, so I gave her a kiss and left.
I stunk. There wasn’t much daylight left when I got there, but I wanted to try out the new Gehmann 510 Iris I had placed on the BRNO peeps mounted on my CZ 452 Military Trainer. I also wanted to try out what I had learned reading High Power Champion Carl Bernosky’s article. I stunk. The last couple of targets I started getting my act together, but my score was worse than earlier this month. For my own debriefing purposes, here is the breakdown. (I want to record this for review when I next dry fire practice.)
- Didn’t dry-fire practice the new techniques enough. Probably less than 25 ’rounds’ dry fired. That’s not enough to get into any habit or muscle memory.
- Unfamiliar with the Gehmann Iris. I had it too closed for the lighting available. My shots improved when I opened it up, but I didn’t do so early enough. The ‘dimmer’ light may have helped with parallax reduction (see page 7), but not seeing the target well killed any parallax help provided.
- Unfamiliar with using the iris’ hood. Sometimes I had it touching my glasses and sometimes not. I totally messed up any consistency with my cheek weld.
- I never really spent much effort on achieving an NPOA with offhand shooting. But the only way I can get the sights to ‘sit still’ on the target for any length of time is to achieve an NPOA first. I didn’t figure that out until the last couple of targets.
- A few times I got the sights to ‘sit still’, but didn’t have the ‘automatic’ reflex to pull the trigger. When I consciously realized the sights were still then I jerked the trigger to get the shot off. Not good.
- While I may not need to take the rifle fully off my shoulder if I don’t fire a shot, I do need to take more time. I’m still into the “rifleman’s cadence” routine and it doesn’t serve my need for this kind of shooting.
- I was using the 2.6mm Ghost Ring in my front globe. I need to check it out more, but it may not be the best to use in dim light. A post might be better.
- Note: Two of the five images were lost in a site hack.
