Colt 3 Man 3 Gun Fun recap

Team Super-Tactical and Team Ham Sandwich met up again for the second leg of the Colt 3 Man 3 Gun event, this time at Peacemaker National Training Center, in SometownYou'veNeverHeardOf, West Virginia.

The stages were challenging and fun again this year and my teammates were there to make sure I was happy. Actually, the unofficial theme of the match was Make Matt Happy, and everyone did a great job, except Steve, who clogged the toilet horribly and was generally smelly and rude all weekend.

We started on the long range stages, which unfortunately I didn't get any video of.  The Pivothead glasses I wear are great for getting video, but they aren't able to see through the tube of my scope so video of those stages would have sucked anyway.  Stage 5 had one team member (me) start on the angled roof, engaging plates at 300 yards and 6 inch speed plates at 125-175 yards. The other two shooters started at either pistol or shotgun and shot 4 steel plates each, then switched to the other area, shooting 4 more plates.  When I was done at the long range, I ran to the shotgun area, then the pistol area to engage my own 4 plates at each position.

Stage 6 was another long stage where we had to engage seven targets from 100 to 300 yards and various distances and of various sizes from prone, and then the long range targets again from a barricade.  I chose to shoot all 7 from prone, then re-engage the three long targets from standing supported on the barricade and this plan worked well. Other shooters decided to take a knee and shoot through one of the barricade ports but kneeling has never been a very stable position for me so I chose not to.

From there, we took the drive back down the hill to stage 1.  This stage was a relay, with the first shooter shooting 8 steel targets with shot, then three slug targets at about 50 yards, then tagging a teammate and running to position two.  While I moved to position two to shoot rifle, Ted began shooting the same thing I had just done at position one.  At position two, I engaged four plates once each from each of two ports on a barricade, then waited for Ted to arrive so I could tag him and go to position three. Position three was a creepy van that you had to shoot from inside of at pistol targets from 15 to 50 yards.

Stage two was another relay, where each shooter started with pistol on some paper targets and two plates each, then ran to the shotgun area and waited to be tagged where you had to load your shotgun then shoot 8 knockdown plates. After that you moved again and then re-engaged the paper targets from earlier in the head with rifle from a barricade.

Stage three was a typical USPSA style "memory" stage, where you had to engage paper targets with rifle and pistol, and clay birds while moving laterally on the stage. Some of the targets could only be seen from certain positions and it was easy to miss one, and end up engaging the same target twice, which would have caused two miss penalties plus a failure to engage (25 seconds of penalties!).  We shot this stage decently well, with the only issue being that I just could not hit the last steel target through the hole in the hard cover. Steve ended up cleaning it up with the shotgun and we cleaned the stage, but I blew probably 10+ seconds on that last target.  From now on, that target presentation will be considered a shotgun target.

Stage four was an all shotgun stage, with spinning targets, knock down steel, clay birds and flying clay birds.  This was all about who could reload shotgun the fastest and who could shoot it with the least makeup shots. Unfortunately I failed both of those tasks but the good news is I forgot to turn on my camera so there's no proof it ever happened, ha!

Here's the video.
Thanks to everyone at the match and my teammates (even you, Steve) for making this a great weekend.  Next year this even might actually be three separate matches with scores combined?! Can't wait