A buddy and I went out to "Best of the West" in Liberty Hill today and had a ton of fun.
I brought my custom 260 rem, and my friend was bringing his new custom 6XC.
It was windy; 15-25 MPH from our 4 o'clock . We'd been shooting at 750 yard steel gongs (and successfully hitting) when we were abruptly confronted by the range officer (RO) and told that "only those who qualified in front of him were allowed to shoot beyond 250 yards". It was only our second time there, and we were just ignorant to the un-posted rule that we had to qualify to shoot beyond that distance. Needless to say he was not pleased, and immediately grabbed his spotting scope/tripod, posted up next to us and told us we'd have to qualify on the spot. (mind you there were six or seven other folks we knew, who were standing four feet behind us observing.)
My buddy and I both looked at each other and gulped; it was time to put up or shut up. We'd only just created our drop charts that day, and were both using relatively untested hand-loads. From our current 750 zero, we dialed the scopes back to 200, came up a half minute, and each scored three successive hits at 250. We were then instructed to dial our scopes to our 500 yard zero, and engage at that distance. my buddy went first; nailed them, thee in a row. I hit my first two, but the third missed by 2". The RO said it was an increase in wind that had caused the miss and told me to shoot again. The 4th center punched it.
He qualified both of us on the spot. I let out a sigh of relief
. Hopefully you guys can appreciate the pressure and relative difficulty of that.
After all the excitement, we adjusted back out to 750 for a while, finally ending up on the 1000 yard targets. I scored 7 hits at 1000 yards out of 12 rounds (32 minutes of elevation to reach that far BTW). I'm sure I'd of done better if it weren't for all the wind.
It was a really fun day;I just had to share