Better late than never

I’ve always been a bit of a procrastinator. Occasionally I’ll get inspired to do something sooner than at the last minute, but that doesn’t happen often. Take this column. I’m writing it only a few hours before submitting it for Friday’s edition. I had all week to write it!

Why am I admitting to this weakness?

The Alaska Territorial Muzzleloading Match started on July 14 and runs through July 17. It’s being held at Ft. Wick, off Yoder Road in the Talkeetna area. For several years now, I’ve wanted to shoot the sighted smoothbore aggregate but didn’t have a proper firearm to do so. A few years back, I found a used Thompson/Center Renegade model long gun in 56-caliber smoothbore on an Internet auction site and bought it. Renegade model long guns are no longer being manufactured and the smoothbore version is not real common. I was lucky to get the one I did.

I set up a shooting box holding all the necessities and started to fire the gun in practice. I decided the smoothbore needed an adjustable tang sight and a globe front sight. After installing the new sights and making sure they were properly adjusted, I took the gun to a Territorial Match. There I read the standards a sighted smoothbore needed to meet in order to compete in the aggregate. That’s when I learned the rear sight must be of a “fixed” or nonadjustable, open style. Obviously, my gun didn’t qualify.

I replaced the globe front sight with the original blade sight After a year or two of looking for the mandated rear sight style, I realized I already had a fixed, open sight I had removed from another rifle years before. The only problem was that this open sight required a dovetail slot on the barrel to be installed. Thompson/Center used screws to mount the factory adjustable rear sight. I needed to visit my gunsmith to get the work done.

I’ve been dealing with a young gunsmith in Anchorage for several years who worked on my modern guns as I needed a repair or an alteration done. He had also done some work on a couple of my blackpowder firearms too. He has always done top-notch work and, in spite of all the other work coming into his shop, has always been very timely in completing the task. Cutting a dovetail is not exclusive to any era of gun manufacturing, but still needs to be done correctly, requiring precise machining, for both fit and function.

Since getting the gun altered required a trip to Anchorage, I managed to put it off for several months, or I forgot about it when I did go into the big city. Finally, with less than two weeks left before this year’s Territorial’s were scheduled to start, I made the trip and explained my dilemma to my friend. He had the gun finished in a little over two days. Now I needed to do some shooting to get the gun sighted back in.

I visited the shooting range last Saturday to begin the process. The sights were already fairly close with my chosen load of powder and round ball, but I still needed to do some filing on the front sight to raise the groups. That’s the thing about fixed open sights. You don’t just turn a screw to move the rear sight; you grab a file to adjust for elevation and a hammer to bump the sight for windage. I did a little elevation “adjustment” but need to shoot the gun a lot more to finalize the settings. And time has just run out!

I plan to shoot the smoothbore aggregate anyway using some “Kentucky windage” sighting and hope for the best. Regardless of how well or poorly I shoot, I’ll have another whole year to fine tune the sights. Let’s just hope I won’t procrastinate too long during that span of time before getting the necessary practice done!

The king salmon season is over for another year. The final results aren’t in yet, but from all appearances it was, overall, the best season in nearly a decade for the Valley. The two main measures of this success, the counting weirs on both the Little Susitna and the Deshka Rivers both met or exceeded their respective escapement goals. I’ll be curious to learn the index counts on the more than a dozen other king salmon systems Fish and Game monitors each year to see the big picture.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This column is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman or its parent company, Wick Communications. You can leave Delo a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.